


I See the Stars in You

by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Brief Mentions of Sexual Activity Between Minors, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Flynn is Born Later So He and Wyatt are the Same Age, I Said I Would Never Do A High School AU, M/M, Maria and Asher Snuck Up On Me, Period-Typical Homophobia, Slow Burn, These Idiots I Swear to God, They Stole The Show, and yet here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21549106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels/pseuds/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels
Summary: Maria Flynn isn't always sure what's going on between her son and Wyatt Logan but whatever it is, they sure are dramatic about it.
Relationships: Asher Flynn/Maria Tompkins, Garcia Flynn/Wyatt Logan
Comments: 35
Kudos: 48





	I See the Stars in You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [extasiswings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/gifts).



> This started out with the idea that if Gabriel hadn't died, Maria wouldn't have wanted to uproot him to move to Europe, so Asher would have stayed in Texas with her instead. Which meant that the possibility of a certain pair of idiots spending their childhoods annoying the shit out of each other just skyrocketed.

Asher Flynn was the sort of name that was just broad enough to belong to any sort of society. Any sort of background. It was a bit English, if someone thought about it, but it wasn’t strictly from anywhere. But it sounded nice and solid, reassuring, familiar. A good strong short name.

The accent ruined that.

Asher’s accent immediately pegged him as an outsider. As someone from not just Europe, but _that_ part of Europe. It was not a good time to be seen as even remotely Russian or Eastern European, but especially in a relatively small town in, of all states, Texas.

Even in Asher’s short time in the states, Maria had seen how he was looked at and whispered about by her coworkers. Mr. Flynn, as everyone called him, was ostensibly here in a diplomatic capacity, representing Yugoslavia.

What his real job actually was, people were happy to speculate.

Didn’t stop Maria Tompkins from falling in love with him. She knew what people said—that he was courting her because of her job with NASA. That he was taking advantage of a poor young widow. A single mother, desperate for a father for her son, of course she would date the handsome man even if he was suspicious. Poor Maria. Silly Maria. Ridiculous Maria.

Luckily, she’d never much cared what other people said or thought about her. If she had, she wouldn’t be working at NASA. She wouldn’t have married a Hispanic man the first time around. And she certainly wouldn’t have been dating a man who might or might not be a communist spy.

Whatever the particulars of Asher’s job were, she didn’t ask. He would’ve told her if she had and she didn’t want to compromise him like that. It wasn’t important, anyway. What was important was the way his fingers would slide underneath her palm to gently lift up her knuckles, bringing them to his lips. What was important was the way he always looked to her for permission before he bought Gabriel an ice cream cone. What was important was the way he tapped her schematics and designs and said _NASA’s wasting their time not promoting you, you’re a genius, moja draga._

But Maria had learned the hard way that all good things came to an end. And all things had a price.

Asher had yet to stay the night. Maria had been a good Catholic girl and more than that she didn’t want Gabriel to get used to having a man in his home when that man might disappear. She didn’t want to offer permanence when there could be none. Even if the ‘good’ part of her Catholicism was tempted every day by Asher’s large hands, his firm jaw, the unbearably soft smile in his eyes when he looked at her.

So when he showed up at her doorstep at nine p.m. she knew it was serious.

“Gabriel’s in bed,” she whispered, bringing him into her modest living room. It was only the fifth day out of the hospital for her son. He’d nearly died of anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, in the most terrifying moments of her life. Asher had literally held her upright in the waiting room as she’d prayed like never before, not so much faith as a threat to God, _bring me back my son or else_.

Asher nodded. “I—I wouldn’t want to disturb you at a late hour but I just received the news and I—I considered writing a letter, but.” He gave her one of those little rueful smiles that made her heart ache. “I’m being called back home. They expect me to leave tomorrow.”

Maria’s legs went heavy and she found herself sitting on the couch. “Oh.”

“Yes.”

Of course he couldn’t stay. She had always known that. And yet…

“I would ask if you wanted—that is—” Asher cleared his throat. “I was looking at rings, the other day. Foolish of me, I know. I knew I’d have to—but I couldn’t stop myself.”

“I can’t uproot Gabriel.” If she didn’t have him then—then she would go. What did she have here, anyway? A job where she would never get the respect or salary she deserved because of her gender? Friends who were distant and didn’t understand her? A mother who had stopped speaking to her when she had ‘betrayed her heritage’, who had never once come by to see her grandson?

But she couldn’t take Gabriel to a whole new world, away from his life, make him learn a new culture and language when he was so happy here.

Asher looked at her, his eyes going dark. “Is that the only reason?”

“Of course it is.” Maria stood up again. “How can you think—” Did he not know? She had never said it aloud, but she’d thought it was understood, implicit…

“I don’t want you to go,” she whispered, the first time she’d admitted to such a want in years. “And if you did have to go then I want to follow.”

Asher looked frozen, and so she crossed to him, slid her hands up his arms, to his shoulders, until she cupped his face—and then all at once he came alive, grasping her, crushing her to him as he never had before, his lips warm and sure against hers.

“Maria,” he whispered, and that was all, and yet it was everything.

She didn’t cry until after he left, when she was alone. She had been so alone, after losing one husband, and so she had gotten into the habit of only letting herself go when there was no one else around. It was always going to end this way, she’d known that, and yet knowing it hadn’t made this any less painful.

Until the morning, when she was making breakfast for Gabriel, and got another knock on her door.

It was Asher, suitcase in hand.

“I couldn’t leave,” he said, simply, and that was all.

Well, not _all_. There was bringing him into her home. There was a ring on her finger. There was his arm over her waist in the morning, his warmth beside her, and there was a strange bubble building in her chest that she suspected was happiness.

And there was a boy.

Garcia.

* * *

Wyatt’s earliest memory was standing on the porch of his house while a pale blue car drove away. He remembered thinking that it was the color of the sky and worrying that the car was going to become a part of the sky and disappear into it.

For a few years after that he would whisper up to the sky when nobody was looking. Night and day. Just in case she could hear him. Dad wouldn’t say where Mama had gone to, so Wyatt just assumed she’d gone to the sky and would be back at some point to get him. She had to come back, after all, didn’t she?

But she never did.

Instead he just had his father, and Dad was… a piece of work, as Gramps used to say. Wyatt would’ve lived in fear of his father, but his father had told him that men, real men, didn’t cry and they didn’t get scared. So he didn’t. He was fine. He wasn’t scared at all.

There were a lot of things real men didn’t do.

For one thing, real men didn’t play _princess_ with the _girls_.

“What’s wrong with playing with the girls?” The boy had an odd accent, almost like he was trying to imitate someone, and Wyatt had a vague notion of a tall dark-haired man at the supermarket and Dad saying something about _fuckin’ foreigners_ and _commie shits_.

“You don’t do that if you’re a boy,” Wyatt replied, safe in the superiority of knowing something this other boy didn’t.

The boy scowled. “I think you’re just being a butthead. I can play whatever I want. The girls have good ideas. It’s more fun than whatever stupid game you’re playing.”

“It’s not stupid!”

“So is!”

“Is not!”

That was how Wyatt ended up getting into a shoving match, which led to him getting into the principal’s office, which was never a good thing. He thought maybe Dad would be proud of him for being a real man, for defending himself and being tough, but that was the tricky thing about Dad—you never quite knew what to expect with him. He would zig when you thought he’d zag.

“Hey, why are you shaking?” the other boy asked. Wyatt hadn’t even gotten his name.

“I’m not,” Wyatt replied. Shaking meant he was scared, and he wasn’t scared of Dad. He wasn’t scared of anything.

“Garcia?” An angel with brown hair walked into the office. “What is this I’m hearing about you getting in a fight?”

That was how Wyatt Logan met Garcia Flynn.

Overall, a rather inauspicious beginning.

* * *

For the next couple of years, Garcia Flynn was his mortal enemy. They hated each other. Wyatt couldn’t say exactly why he hated Flynn, but the why didn’t matter so much as enforcing the strength of the emotion and making sure that everyone knew about it.

It helped when Flynn caused Wyatt’s volcano to explode in science class. Or when Flynn threw paper airplanes that somehow always managed to hit him right in the back of the head. Or when Flynn would sit right in front of him and tap his pencil against the desk in that way that he knew drove Wyatt nuts.

Of course, Wyatt retaliated. He wasn’t going to let this kind of thing lie. He put itching powder in Flynn’s shoes before gym class. He drew very unflattering (and hilarious, thanks) pictures of Flynn and passed them to him in class (Flynn would send them back just correcting Wyatt’s spelling because he was insufferable). He also used the pencil sharpener way more than he had to because he knew the sound made Flynn start to twitch.

They shoved each other trying to outrun one another during P.E. and tried to hit each other in the head with dodgeballs, they told each other to eat dirt, eat worms, eat shit, they stuck notes to the back of each other’s shirts that said _kick me_.

He was twelve when that changed.

Dad had kept him up all last night working on the car, so he was tired as shit, not looking where he was going. He should’ve been, though, because the side wall that looked out over the track field was where Jake Nelson and his ilk liked to hang out, and they’d as soon punch you for your lunch money as look at you.

Wyatt was good at throwing a punch. He’d learned from the best, after all. And he could take a punch too. For the same reasons. But five guys against one wasn’t gonna be fun.

“Oh, look.” Jake Nelson had this kind of smile that made you wonder if he was throwing puppies against a brick wall in his spare time. “It’s Dumbo.”

Wyatt’s ears kind of stuck out from his head and Dumbo was about as far as Jake’s brain cells could stretch when it came to imagination.

He clutched his backpack more tightly to himself. “Back off.”

“Or what?” Clearly Jake was in the mood for a fight. Wyatt wasn’t scared. Men didn’t get scared.

“Or I’ll break your nose,” a new voice said.

Wyatt turned around to see Garcia Flynn standing there. He’d hit an early growth spurt and was a good couple inches taller than every other person in class, and he was glaring at Jake like he was really going to make good on his promise.

“What’s it to you?” Jake replied.

“You don’t hurt people, it’s not right.” Flynn—Wyatt had always called him by his last name to show his hatred for him, and Flynn had always done the same, calling Wyatt ‘Logan’—sounded like he was quoting something a parent had told him, but he also sounded like he genuinely believed in what he was saying.

Jake shoved Wyatt aside, getting up into Flynn’s face. “I don’t think you’ll really do it.”

Wyatt could’ve told Jake that was a bad call.

Flynn swung, hard, and sent Jake literally flying back a foot. Jake’s friends lit on him at once, and Wyatt found himself dropping his backpack to latch onto them, swinging wildly, hoping he was actually doing some damage.

Flynn ended up with a broken nose, and Wyatt got a swollen lip, but hey, they held their own.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he told Flynn as they waited for Flynn’s mom to come pick him up. Dad wasn’t going to come. The principal hadn’t even tried calling him. He knew the drill by now. Wyatt was going to walk home like usual.

“’Course I did,” Flynn replied. “I’m the only one allowed to be an asshole to you.”

Wyatt elbowed him. “You’re a dick.”

“So’re you.”

They kept elbowing each other until Maria Flynn arrived, out of breath. “I had to leave an astrophysics lecture, Garcia, this had better be good.”

Flynn jumped up. “They were bullying him, Mama! You always say to stand up to bullies!”

Maria Flynn still looked like an angel to Wyatt. She had soft brown hair and these big angled eyes that looked like they belonged on a wild animal, or to a witch. He thought she was the prettiest person he’d ever seen. Even prettier than the actresses in movies.

“You’re the Logan boy, aren’t you?” she asked.

Wyatt tried to mind his manners and he stood up, his hands twisting in front of him. “Yes’m,” he said, ducking his head down.

Maria laughed. “The way Garcia talks about you, you’d think you were a hellion. I think he’s a very sweet boy.” Maria gave Flynn a stern look.

“He’s nice to _you_ ,” Flynn grumbled.

Wyatt stuck his tongue out at him.

“Is your father not going to pick you up?” Maria asked.

Wyatt shrugged. “I just walk home.”

A look that Wyatt didn’t understand passed over Maria’s face, and she said, “why don’t you come home with us for a bit instead? I’m sure your father won’t mind if you do your homework with Garcia for a bit. I can make you a sandwich.”

…Dad probably wouldn’t have any food in the house again. He could go see Gramps but that was risky. Gramps was Mom’s dad, and he and Dad didn’t get along so well. But Dad would probably be out late anyway and he couldn’t get mad at Wyatt for doing his homework at a friend’s house could he?

Not that Flynn was his friend, or anything.

“Sure,” he said. “Thanks, Mrs. Flynn.”

Maria smiled at him, and something in Wyatt yearned, the way he had when he’d looked up at the sky and thought about that blue car driving away. “Call me Maria.”

* * *

Maria watched Wyatt Logan carefully as he followed Garcia around, suddenly docile inside of their house. Garcia seemed equal parts puzzled and pleased with Wyatt’s quiet behavior, tugging him around to show him things like the model plane he was building with Asher and the photographs of Gabriel, who was in college and Garcia’s hero.

“Who’s the ghost following our son around the house?” Asher asked.

He was always so patient. She didn’t know how he stood it. Not that she was the bread winner, but that he was just sitting around the house all day with nothing to do. It was hard to find work in a town like this when you didn’t fit the good old American type, as her first husband had also learned. Asher was highly intelligent, well educated, and yet none of that mattered. She’d tried to get him work at NASA but it was an uphill battle.

But Asher never complained. And it gave him more time with Garcia and Gabriel which she knew the boys loved.

“That’s Wyatt Logan.”

Asher stared at her. “ _That’s_ Wyatt Logan? Wyatt Logan who never shuts up? Wyatt Logan who drew ‘stupid pictures’ of Garcia in class? Wyatt Logan who shoved him off the monkey bars?”

Maria nodded. “Apparently.”

Asher peered around the corner to watch Garcia show Wyatt the picture of the horse he wanted that he was going to ask Santa to get him for Christmas. Wyatt nodded very solemnly, staring at Garcia with wide, bright blue eyes. He looked rather frail, like he wasn’t getting a lot to eat.

“He doesn’t look like the kind of kid who would give Garcia a run for his money,” Asher noted.

“He has hidden depths, it seems,” Maria replied.

“Garcia seems to like him.”

Maria watched as her son dragged Wyatt into the kitchen. “Papa!” he yelled. “I want to make Wyatt a sandwich!”

Asher was the cook in the family.

“I feel like I should feed him three sandwiches,” Asher observed.

“I feel like making a drive out to his father’s house,” Maria replied. “I’ve heard stories about Jeb Logan.” Stories that she didn’t like one bit.

Asher gave her a small, warm smile and tugged her in. “Should I get a shovel to help you bury the body?”

Maria nudged his nose with hers. “No need, I’ll just throw him into one of the jet engines and let that incinerate him.”

Asher gave a hearty laugh. His laughs were rare, which made them feel all the more earned.

In the kitchen, Maria noticed Wyatt jump at the sound and grab onto Garcia’s arm.

“It’s just Papa,” Garcia said, looking at him. “It’s okay.”

Wyatt swallowed. “Yeah, I know. I’m not scared. My dad always says—real men don’t get scared.”

Real men. Maria wrapped her arms around her husband’s neck and ran her hands through his hair, smiling at him, feeling Wyatt’s eyes on the two of them the whole time like he was watching something new, and strange, and not quite real.

Oh yes. She was going to make sure Wyatt Logan came over to her house quite a lot from now on.

* * *

Flynn closed his eyes against the summer heat, feeling the warmth beating against his skin. This was the highest point in town, a tall hill with an old oak tree on it, and when he’d been younger, he’d run up here to pretend he was closer to the astronauts and planets that his mom worked with.

There was the sound of pounding footsteps and Flynn shot up just in time to roll to the side and avoid being tackled. “Flynn!”

“Watch it, you moron!” he snapped, as Wyatt landed with a loud _oomph_ in the spot where Flynn had just been lying. “Jesus, Logan, are you trying to kill me?”

“Oh, totally.” Wyatt rolled over and grinned up at him, skin all freckled from the summer sun. “With you gone I’ll finally get some peace and quiet around here.”

“I was being peaceful and quiet, you went and ruined it.” Flynn acted like it annoyed him, like Wyatt annoyed him, but really, he was glad that Wyatt’s attention was always on him. That Wyatt followed him around and wrote him notes in class and bugged him until Flynn was ready to hit him over the head.

He’d always been aware that of the Flynn brothers, he was the, well, the not-so-suave one. And now that he was fourteen and Gabriel was a dashing twenty-two, in his senior year of college, it was more prominent than ever. All the other kids in their high school—the girls, really—had noticed that Gabriel looked like a younger version of Antonio Banderas or some ridiculous shit like that, and all summer he’d had to watch his classmates practically throw themselves at his brother. Never mind that they were all far too young for Gabriel and Gabriel treated it all with detached amusement. And it grated on Flynn like nothing else.

But Wyatt still preferred him. Wyatt came over every day, did homework with him, ate dinner with him, stayed over half the time. Wyatt was still his.

Wyatt reached up and poked him. “Nah, you were falling asleep. I’m making your life more exciting.”

Flynn batted his hand away. “You keep telling yourself that.”

That was the thing, though—he did.

* * *

Jessica Moore was assigned Wyatt’s partner freshman year of high school in chemistry class. She was blonde, with a perky nose and sassy sparkling dark eyes.

Wyatt was enamored immediately.

Next thing Flynn knew it was Jess this and Jess that and Jess was so cool and could Jess sit with them at lunch?

“The annoying thing is—she is cool!” he told Mom that evening as they washed dishes. Papa cooked, so Mom and Garcia did the washing up, that was how it worked. “She has the best jokes.”

“What kind of jokes?”

“…I can’t remember any,” Flynn replied, because he wasn’t about to share sex jokes with his mother.

His mother gave him a knowing look. “And why is it annoying that Jess is cool?”

“Because I can’t hate her for taking all of Wyatt’s time!” Flynn gestured with a plate and nearly smashed it against the corner of the cupboard. “He’s never here anymore, he’s always hanging out with her, and he talks about her all the time, and it’s the most annoying thing on the planet, he never shuts up about her!”

“Have you talked to Wyatt about this?” Mom asked.

Flynn felt the blood drain out of his face. “Hell no, he’d never let me live it down.” For some unspeakable reason the idea of telling Wyatt how he felt made something deep inside of him shrink down in fear.

Mom sighed. “Suit yourself. I think you should become friends with Jess if you think she’s cool. And remember.” She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Jess might be the shiny new toy, but Garcia, you’re Wyatt’s best friend. He’s going to always be there, I promise. Just let him get used to Jess, okay?”

He’d never thought of himself as Wyatt’s best friend before. Best friend. Yeah. That sort of fit the weird warm feeling in his chest when he was around Wyatt.

“I hope you’re right,” he grumbled, and Mom rolled her eyes.

“He gets this drama from you,” she called out to Papa.

“I can’t hear you!” Papa replied from the living room even though he most definitely could.

Flynn smiled. At least one thing stayed the same, and that was his parents being ridiculous.

* * *

They would go up to the hill at night, too, when they weren’t supposed to, when they were supposed to be in bed. Wyatt couldn’t always be at Flynn’s. Dad didn’t like it. But he hated being at home. And during the summer and parts of the spring and fall it was warm enough that who cared if they were outside without a blanket? Flynn was warm enough, anyway, a whole line of warmth against Wyatt’s side.

Men didn’t touch other men like this, or as often as this, but it was okay. Flynn didn’t count, really. And he still shoved and poked and kicked Wyatt just as much as he held and petted and hugged him so really, it all worked out. Flynn was tactile. Came with being a mama’s boy, Wyatt figured.

Sometimes he thought he might’ve been a mama’s boy, if his mom had stuck around.

“Y’know when I was little,” he said, as Flynn slowly drifted off from pointing out constellations, “I used to think my mom was up there. I don’t know like she was a piece of the sky or something.”

“Because she was dead?” Flynn asked.

“No. I mean she probably is. But no. Because she drove off in this car that was blue like the sky so I thought that was where she went. I was three when she left so I wasn’t exactly fuckin’ Einstein.”

Flynn hummed. Flynn had been kind of quiet lately. Wyatt wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was Gabriel being around all summer. Maybe it was the war back in Europe, the war from Asher’s home. Asher was quiet lately, too.

“She shouldn’t have left you,” Flynn said. His voice was quiet but it had that fierce tone that it got, that tone that Wyatt loved because Flynn only got that tone when he was talking about Wyatt.

“It wasn’t her fault,” Wyatt replied. “That’s what Gramps said. She was a meth addict. Gramps said that it changed her brain. Made her do things. And I mean. Who’d want to live with my dad, y’know?”

“She could’ve taken you with her. She should have.”

“Not all of us can have perfect parents, okay?” Wyatt snapped, surprised at his own anger. He wanted Flynn’s parents to be his parents, except that would make Flynn his brother, and that didn’t feel right for some reason.

“My parents aren’t perfect.”

“Yeah, well, they love each other and they love you, so.”

Flynn’s fingers lay next to his in the grass and they almost, but not quite, brushed against each other, the ghost of them intertwining. But just the ghost of them.

“You have people who love you,” Flynn said quietly. “Jess loves you.”

Wyatt hoped she did. Sometimes he wasn’t sure. Sometimes he wasn’t sure about himself, either. “Yeah well… yeah.”

“You don’t bring her up here, do you?” Flynn asked. He sounded uncharacteristically nervous.

“No. This is our spot.”

Wyatt turned his face in time to see Flynn smiling up at the stars.

* * *

The thing was, Flynn really did like Jess. He was kind of sad when she and Wyatt didn’t work out as a couple and broke it off sophomore year.

Kind of.

“I’m not going to be your go-between,” he warned Wyatt after Wyatt asked him to tell Jess yet another passive-aggressive message. “I’m your friend, Logan, I’m not a messenger pigeon for your divorce proceedings.”

Wyatt rolled his eyes. “Does that make you the kid?”

“Yeah, right, I’m more mature than both of you.” Flynn was sure that they could still hang out with Jess, just… once things had cooled down and she and Wyatt were no longer trying to rip each other’s throats out.

His money was on Jess, personally.

They exited the school and Wyatt heaved a sigh of relief. “Fuck algebra, man.”

“If you’d just let me do your homework for you…”

“No way. If you get caught your mom’ll kill you.”

“Yeah, but you can’t fail and get held back a year, Logan, what am I supposed to do without you?”

“Suffer?” Wyatt shrugged. “My other grades are okay. My German’s really good. All that practicing with your dad.” He perked up. “Hey, can I come over?”

“Do you even have to ask?”

A sleek Mustang pulled up in front of the school and Flynn groaned. Gabriel.

Wyatt went bug-eyed the way he did whenever he saw the beautiful car that Gabriel had restored.

His older brother got out of the car and Flynn saw a few senior girls standing over by the trash can giggling and whispering amongst themselves. Great. “We’re walking home, Gabriel, you don’t have to give us a ride.”

“Of course I do.” Gabriel grinned. “Mom asked me to pick you up and take you out to McDonald’s or something for dinner.”

Oh, great, that meant she and Papa were up to something. Sometimes Flynn wished his parents could be like everyone else’s parents that he knew and settle into a relaxed truce of mutual tolerance so that they wouldn’t be pawing each other all the time. A kid didn’t need to see that about his parents, right? But on the other hand—he loved creeping downstairs and watching them dancing to songs on the radio, and the way his mom was one of the few people who could make his dad laugh, and how his dad would kiss her hand like he was a knight and she was his lady. He liked that his parents were still stupidly in love.

“You too, Wyatt,” Gabriel said, and to Flynn’s surprise Wyatt started and _blushed_. “Mom said you’re coming to dinner, too.”

Wyatt’s grandfather had died last year. After that, Wyatt had started spending even more time at Flynn’s place, sleeping over as often as he could. A few times, when Wyatt had to stay home, Flynn would climb into Wyatt’s bedroom window and sleep with him, crawling out before his dad got up in the mornings.

Wyatt never talked about his dad. Flynn hadn’t even ever officially met the man. But nobody, not even someone as reckless and clumsy as Wyatt, fell out of trees or off bikes as often as Wyatt claimed he did. Nobody jumped at random loud noises if they had nothing to fear. And nobody told their best friend _you really can’t meet my dad, it’s, uh, not safe for you_ unless something was wrong.

So he tried to sneak in sometimes. He was tall, and strong, and Gabriel had taught him how to punch and how to dodge and weave. Wyatt’s dad would never come into his room and hurt him under Flynn’s watch.

“Your car’s awesome, Gabriel,” Wyatt said, his cheeks still pink.

“You think so?” Gabriel winked at him. “Might let you take a look under the hood later. Garcia says you love cars.”

Wyatt’s cheeks got even pinker, stars in his eyes, and Flynn’s stomach twisted painfully. Why was Wyatt staring at Gabriel like that? He’d never bothered looking at Gabriel before. Wyatt was _his_.

Flynn got into the back seat, slightly mollified when Wyatt got into the back with him instead of taking the front seat. “Your brother is the coolest person on the planet,” Wyatt told him.

“Sure,” Flynn said, wanting to punch Gabriel in the face and not really knowing why.

* * *

Wyatt wasn’t sure why Flynn of all people was getting to win puberty and shoot up to six feet while Wyatt was stuck with a measly five foot nine inches, but at least it meant that nobody bothered Flynn, or anyone Flynn was friends with—at least to his face.

Away from Flynn, however, it was another matter.

“You know his father’s a spy, right?”

Wyatt paused in the locker room. The voices came from the other side, so he couldn’t see faces, but he heard enough bodies moving around to guess it was three boys. The one talking, of course, was fucking Jake Nelson. Motherfucker.

“He was selling secrets to the Russians about the Space Race from his wife,” Jake went on.

“Is she a spy too?”

“Nah, probably just stupid, you seen how she looks at him? I bet he just fucks her all the time to keep her happy and she doesn’t suspect a thing. Women in science is fucking ridiculous.”

Maria Flynn was the smartest woman that Wyatt knew. When he’d first seen her, he’d thought she was a goddamn angel, and sometimes when he found extra food packed into his backpack, and when she gave him extra clothes she’d “accidentally” bought that didn’t fit Flynn, he was still sure that she was.

“No wonder Garcia’s so fucked up,” another voice said, and Wyatt saw fucking red and stomped around the corner.

“Hey!”

Jake and the two boys with him—Wyatt recognized their faces but not their names—looked up in surprise. “You got some shit to say about my friend?”

Jake Nelson smirked at him. “Sure do, why, you gonna do something about it? I thought you were too busy sucking his dick.”

Wyatt felt his face flush and his chest heat up. It wasn’t the first time someone had made a joke like that about him and Flynn, and it was—it was fine, because y’know, it wasn’t true, Wyatt liked girls. One time he’d made out with Jess and she’d let him put his hands on her breasts and he’d just about died in a good way. He wasn’t, y’know. Doing any of that. With Flynn. Whatever.

Besides, real men weren’t into other men. And he didn’t care what Dad tried to say, Wyatt was a man and he was going to prove it to his old man if it killed him, would get Dad to respect him if it fucking took everything in him.

“Hey,” he told Jake, “just because you spend all your time taking it up the ass doesn’t mean the rest of us do.”

Wrong thing to say. Jake stood up, and fuck, Jake had a good twenty pounds and two inches on him, and he was storming over like he was going to beat Wyatt into next week.

Wyatt grit his teeth. Jake was nothing compared to Dad when he had half a whiskey bottle in him.

Jake swung at him but Wyatt ducked and hit him in the gut, making Jake double over. The other guy grabbed him, slamming him into the locker, and Wyatt elbowed him in the chest right as the third guy tried to knee him in the crotch, only just missing and hitting Wyatt’s thigh instead. Wyatt swung wildly, connecting with something, but the guys threw him to the floor and Jake clamored on top of him, sitting on Wyatt’s chest so he couldn’t breathe.

“Faggot!” Jake spit.

“Takes one to know one!” Wyatt spat back. He was going to get the absolute shit beat out of him, and he knew it. _Pretend it’s Dad, you can handle Dad, don’t let them see you cry, it’s fine, you’ve handled worse, at least it’s not a belt buckle—_

A random fist came from the side and hit Jake right in the jaw, sending him crumpling to the floor.

Wyatt looked up to see Jess standing there, face white with fury. Jake pushed himself up, his two friends gaping. “You shouldn’t have done that, Moore,” he growled.

Jess looked at him like he was dog shit. “I’d be real careful about trying to hit the head cheerleader. You’ve got two suspensions already.”

Jake’s friend tugged at his shoulder. “Let’s go, man, it’s not worth it.”

Jake backed away. “Watch your back, Logan. You and that traitor friend of yours both. His dad’s scum and so’s he.”

“Eat shit, Nelson,” Wyatt replied, letting Jess help him to his feet.

Jake and his two buddies grabbed their bags and backed out of the locker room.

Jess helped Wyatt sit down. “Careful, let me check for a concussion.” She felt the back of his head.

“What were you doing in here?” Wyatt asked.

“I wanted to talk to you and I heard yelling.” Jess sat down next to him. “Why were they calling you that?”

“Fuck if I know,” Wyatt replied, his stomach knotting uncomfortably. “It’s just stupid stuff. Saying I… y’know.” _Suck dick._

Jess looked at him for a long moment, and Wyatt got the odd impression that she was seeing more of him than he was of himself. “If you were, what they said, you know I wouldn’t tell anyone, right?”

“But I’m not. Jess, I liked— _you_.”

“I mean, I heard you can like both.”

“Jess.” Wyatt shook his head. “Everyone knows that people like that, they get—they’re sick, and wrong, and they get like, AIDS and shit like that. I’m not like that. I’m normal, I’m not… I like cars, and beer, and girls.”

Jess put her hands up. “Okay, okay, whatever you say. Just—I saw you looking at Gabriel a few times, I thought maybe—”

“Gabriel’s just cool, and he knows about cars, what’s wrong with having a role model, huh?” Wyatt folded his arms, knowing he was pouting like a kid but not really able to stop it. “Besides, they weren’t talking about Gabriel, they were talking about Garcia and me and that doesn’t even make any fucking sense. Have you seen the guy? Gabriel looks like he should be in a movie but Flynn’s all these fucking long limbs and he’s all gangly and his hands are huge, they don’t even fit the rest of him, and his feet, too, I trip over them all the time, and his eyes can’t decide what damn color they are. He’s like this oversized baby hawk or something.”

Jess raised an eyebrow, and then said in an oddly dry tone, “Yeah, can’t imagine why they thought you and Flynn were a thing. They were totally off base.”

Silence fell. Wyatt didn’t really know what to say to that. He felt exposed, oddly, and wrong-footed. “You won’t… don’t tell Flynn about what they were saying. About this. I know he—he’s real defensive of his dad, y’know? Asher, I mean, they don’t talk about it but I heard a lot when I was a kid, and I was over at their house. Asher gave up a lot because he loved Maria. He doesn’t deserve this bullshit. And Flynn’ll—he shouldn’t do something stupid.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” Jess promised, and for some reason it sounded like she was promising about more than just what Wyatt had asked.

Jess stood up, and a strange impulse seized him like a fire sparking, and he snatched her wrist. “Jess?”

She looked back at him.

“If I—if I did think, those things, you wouldn’t tell anyone about that, either? My dad’ll kill me if he even thinks that I’m a… a…” He swallowed, his throat dry and tight.

Jess took his hand, squeezing it. “You were a shit boyfriend, Wyatt, but you’re a good friend. And even if you were a total jerk—I’d never say anything. Okay? Whatever it is. If there is anything, you can always tell me.”

Wyatt didn’t feel… relaxed, exactly, but like something in his chest loosened, just a little. He was able to swallow. “Thanks, Jess.”

Jess pulled him to his feet. “C’mon, Logan. You’re buying me an ice cream.”

* * *

Maria heard the front door slam and sighed over her notes. “Wipe your feet on the mat!”

“Sorry, Mom.” “Sorry, Maria.”

There was the sound of laughter and she peered down the hallway to see Garcia bracing one hand against the wall, his other arm around Wyatt’s shoulders, whispering something in Wyatt’s ear. Wyatt’s hand was crammed against his mouth to try and keep the laughter in while the other one was clutching Garcia’s shirt to keep him upright, his legs shaking with mirth.

Maria smiled, and pretended not to notice that Garcia was wearing the same outfit as yesterday. If her son thought she and Asher didn’t hear him sneaking out occasionally to spend the night at Wyatt’s place, he had another think coming.

“Have an apple or something from the fridge,” she ordered. “Before you start tearing into the cookies.”

“We weren’t going to have the cookies,” Garcia blatantly lied.

“Sure you weren’t. Wyatt, give me your math homework and we’ll go over it together, Garcia, take a shower and change your clothes.”

“ _Mom_ , we’re not five!”

“And yet you act like it. Off you go.”

She heard more muffled laughter, and then saw Garcia tugging Wyatt up the stairs, hands clutching at each other.

Hmmm.

Wyatt had dinner with them as usual, and then he and Garcia settled in the basement to watch a couple movies since, “it’s Friday, Mom, it’s fine, we’ll get our homework done.”

“He gets this rebellious streak from you,” Asher noted as they settled on the living room couch with their books.

Maria kicked him lightly with her foot. “Says the man who betrayed his country.”

Asher shook his head. He set his book aside and turned, crawling across the couch, hovering over her. “I simply re-evaluated my priorities.”

“Mmm, is that so?” She pulled him down to her, only to hear the microwave go off.

The boys’ popcorn. Asher groaned.

“I’ll bring it to them.” Maria lightly pushed him off of her and got up, fetching the popcorn and heading down to the basement.

Garcia was sprawled out all over the oversized leather couch, Wyatt lying on his stomach, his head pillowed on Garcia’s thigh. Garcia was absently petting Wyatt’s hair. “What the hell is wrong with you? _Princess Bride_ is a classic.”

“I don’t care if it’s a classic, I want to watch _Lethal Weapon_.”

“It’s boring.”

“You only think it’s boring because there’s no romance in it.”

“Well fucking sue me for wanting some—” Garcia caught sight of Maria and blanched. “Uh.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear any of that swearing,” Maria said, walking down the stairs and handing him the popcorn, “if you two keep your bickering quiet.”

“Yes ma’am,” Wyatt said immediately.

Maria put her hand on the back of his neck, massaging for a moment. It had taken her months to get to a point where Wyatt wouldn’t shy away or flinch from her touch, and even longer when it came to Asher, but now she noticed that it soothed him.

Her favorite daydreams were the ones where she chopped Jeb Logan’s head off with a shovel and then buried him out in the oil fields.

Once, when Wyatt was thirteen, she’d driven him home at her insistence. Wyatt had been terrified but trying not to show it as she’d marched up to his front door to meet Jeb. “Hi,” she’d said, smiling. “I’m Maria Flynn, I’m the mother of Wyatt’s friend. I hope you don’t mind him staying over at our place to do homework. He’s a very bright boy.”

Jeb had looked her up and down like she was a snake. “You’re the woman who thinks herself a scientist. Married to the commie.”

Maria had nearly punched him but had wanted to be a good example for Wyatt. “Yup! That’s me. Is it all right if Wyatt stays over sometimes? He seems so relaxed at our place. I’d hate for you to not know where he was and worry that something had happened to him. I know I would be worried. If I didn’t know. If he didn’t show up for school or hang out with Garcia. I might even have to call the police.”

She’d stared at Jeb, and he’d stared at her, and she’d seen the light dawn in his eyes. “Wyatt can stay with you as much as he wants,” he’d said, sullenly.

“I’m so glad.” Maria had smiled brightly. “You know how it is with us women, we’re just so emotional! Cheerful one minute, plotting murder the next.”

She’d never seen Jeb since then, but Wyatt spent ninety percent of his time at her house and was well fed and well clothed and his grades were up, so she counted it as a victory. Especially since she knew what the police were actually like in this damn town and she didn’t count on them to do a fucking thing if she called them.

Wyatt smiled up at her. “Thanks for the popcorn, Maria.”

 _Mom,_ she thought, as she did every time. _Call me Mom, honey, come home and stay, stay with us._

“Of course,” she said instead. “Have fun, boys.”

They stayed up far too late, of course. When she came downstairs at one in the morning it was to find the screen blue and both boys passed out on the couch, a tangle of limbs.

She didn’t bother moving them. She just got a blanket and covered them. As she turned away to turn off the television, Garcia pawed at her sleepily. “Mama?”

“Hey, baby, it’s me.” She crouched down so they were at eye level. It was only when he was lying down like this that she was the taller one. She lived with a family of giants. “You need something?”

Garcia shook his head. His arm was thrown over Wyatt’s lower back. Maria inhaled carefully. “Garcia, honey, you know… you know that your father and I love you, right? No matter what?”

Her son’s forehead wrinkled. “I know,” he replied, sounding confused.

She took his hand, needing him to understand this. “I mean it, Garcia. You can tell us anything. If you… if you feel… if you and Wyatt are, more than friends… it’s okay with us.”

Garcia blinked a few times, looking more awake. He had his father’s dark, dark hair and his strong jawline. It made her ache sometimes to look at him, to see how fast he was growing up. It still seemed like yesterday she’d held him in her arms for the first time, a terrifyingly fragile weight. “Mama, Wyatt and I aren’t… we’re just friends. We’re not, um. We’re not dating.”

Maria almost didn’t believe him, but Garcia had always, if anything, been _too_ honest rather than the other way around. “Oh, okay then, that’s okay. I only… well if you do ever, that’s okay. I just wanted you to know that.”

“What made you think we were?”

Where to even begin? The fact that they touched constantly? The fact that they spent every waking moment together? The fact that the look on Garcia’s face when he looked at Wyatt was one she’d seen before—in Asher when he looked at her? She adored that look, memorized it, did any number of ridiculous things to get him to look at her like that. She would know it anywhere.

“It doesn’t matter, baby.” She stroked through her son’s hair. “You just do whatever feels right. Go back to sleep. I’ll have Papa make pancakes in the morning.”

Garcia nodded and snuggled back down, and she stood up to go. But then he added, “Mama?”

“Hmm?” She turned off the television.

“Look.”

Maria turned, and Garcia slowly, carefully, pushed up the back of Wyatt’s shirt.

His back had mottled bruises on it.

Maria felt rage spike in her, her vision going red. “I’ll take care of it, Garcia. Don’t you worry.”

Garcia lowered Wyatt’s shirt again. “He should just live with us.”

She sighed. “Yes, baby, he should. But if we try and make him, his father could get us arrested for kidnapping. We could be in big trouble.”

“But you’ll take care of it?”

“I will.” Maria never broke a promise to her children. “Go to sleep. I’ll handle this.”

* * *

Wyatt woke up to Dad yanking him out of bed by his ankles. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I ought to be asking you that,” Dad growled. He had that drunken glaze in his eyes. “I hear from fuckin’ Eugene, fuckin’ _Eugene Nelson_ that you and that Russian bastard’s kid—”

“Asher’s not Russian—what the _fuck_ are you talking about?” Wyatt demanded, even as fear shot through him like a bullet of ice.

“I told you to stop hanging out with that kid, I fucking told you, but you never listen—”

Wyatt knew what was coming and felt something inside of him snap like a rubber band. He wasn’t going to take this anymore, he just wasn’t going to fucking take it.

He would’ve liked to say that he stood up to his father and gave him what-for. That he asserted himself. That he declared his independence and possibly also delivered a punch to go with it to make up, somewhat, for the hits he’d received over the years.

He didn’t do any of those things.

Wyatt shoved Dad out of the way, rushing down the stairs, barefoot, still in his pajamas, and swiped the key’s to his father’s oh-so-precious Thunderbird from their spot next to the ash tray on the kitchen table. He could hear Dad behind him, hollering fit to wake the Devil, and Wyatt wasn’t sticking around to see if the Devil showed up.

He slid into the car, jammed the key into the ignition, and lit her up.

 _Just like Mom,_ he thought, only this car was black and red, not blue, not like the sky.

He drove, and drove, and drove, out into the backwoods, running the car ragged, scratching her against trees, messing up her bumper and precious paint and all the rest of her, until he could see the lake glinting through the trees like another piece of sky and thought, _fuck it._

Standing on the edge of the lake, watching the car sink below the water, he felt a kind of reckless triumph he hadn’t felt in—in possibly ever.

Then the reality sank in.

He’d fled from Dad. He’d driven his beloved car into a lake.

He was _dead_.

* * *

When Wyatt missed his third day of school, Maria drove up to the Logan house. It was back a ways from the other houses, out towards the boondocks near the woods.

“Wyatt?” She rapped on the front door. “Wyatt, it’s Maria.”

The door was yanked open. Maria took in Jeb’s red eyes, the glassy stare in them. “He’s not here.”

“Where is he, then?” She cocked her head, sizing him up. He was drunk, which could make him either easier to take down, or harder. He was bigger and heavier than she was, but not by too much.

“Gone.”

Maria opened the screen door that remained between them and stepped smartly over the threshold. “Then I’ll just wait here until he comes back.”

“Stole my car, the fuckin’ little—he’s over the border by now with it, ungrateful shit.”

“Kids. They never appreciate what we do for them, do they?” Maria inspected the kitchen. “You give them specific instructions and they go against them anyway. You sure you don’t have any idea where he’d go? Or what made him leave?”

Jeb squinted at her. “Some people say—you’re a spy.”

“Mmm.” Maria fished in her purse. “They’ve said worse things about me. Sit down?”

He seemed very confused by her demeanor. Maria doubted he’d dealt with anyone in some time who wasn’t afraid of him. Maria smiled, and Jeb sat.

She walked around the room, inspecting it. No pictures of Wyatt. No childhood drawings. Nothing, really, to indicate any pride in his existence. Her heart clenched.

“I’m not a spy, by the way.” Her hand closed around the object she’d been looking for and she set her purse down. “My husband was, though. He couldn’t follow instructions either. He was told to come home, and he didn’t. He married me. He was told to use this only in emergencies, and not to tell anyone about it.”

Jeb turned to look at her, as if just now realizing that she was behind him. “What—”

Maria jammed the needle into his neck. “But he told me.”

She pressed down, inserting the poison into him. It was the work of a moment. Asher had sometimes felt guilty about keeping it, had nearly flushed it down the toilet a few times. “Do I want to know what you’re using it for?” he had asked when she’d told him she needed it.

“Something we should’ve done years ago,” she’d replied.

Maria drew the needle out and cleaned it off, dropping it back into her purse. She completely ignored the dying man gagging on the couch.

Now, she just had to find out where Wyatt would run to.

* * *

Flynn cornered Jess after biology class. “You know where he is.”

Jess glanced around, then dragged him down the hall into the library. “Jesus, Flynn, say it a little louder why don’t you.”

“It’s been three weeks, Jess. Three _weeks_.” Flynn felt like he was going to crawl right out of his damn skin. “Where could he possibly—why is he hiding?”

Jess folded her arms. “Because he’s terrified Jeb’ll kill him when he gets back. He’s trying to get enough money to live on his own.”

“He doesn’t have to live on his own, he’ll live with me. With my family.” Wyatt good as lived at his place anyway. Flynn felt like his hands were empty all the time, kept looking around for Wyatt like he was some kind of ghost. “Jess, Jess c’mon. If you know where he is, tell him it’s safe. We’ll take care of him.”

“It’s not that easy, Garcia, and you know it. He’s not eighteen, the police will send him home, they don’t give a shit. Or they could put him in a foster home and we’ll never see him again.”

“Nobody’s heard from Jeb in weeks either, what if he’s gone? What if he left?”

“Or what if he’s hunting Wyatt down?” Jess countered.

“Jess, _please_.” Flynn grabbed her hands. “He’s my only friend. Please.”

Jess’s gaze searched his, her eyes dark. “You’re a pair of idiots, you know that?” she said, only it came out soft instead of in her usual snapping tone. “I’ll talk to him. See what I can do. Okay?”

“Okay. Thanks, Jess.” He hugged her. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She patted his back. “It’ll work out, Garcia. Promise.”

Just as long as he got to see Wyatt again, then yeah, it would work out.

* * *

Wyatt paced back and forth underneath the tree. It was night, the stars shining down on him instead of the warm midday sun, and he shivered.

“I have a run to do in the morning,” he told Jess.

“And Flynn is less important than your run?” she replied.

Wyatt glared at her and kept pacing.

He hadn’t seen Flynn in a month. He hadn’t seen anyone in a month besides Jess. He couldn’t. If he did, if anyone knew where he was, Dad could find him. If he went to school then the teachers might tell or one of his classmates—and what if someone found out what he was doing?

At least his driving skills were finally coming in handy. Even if smuggling across the border wasn’t how he’d expected to use them. In the back of his mind he knew that Gabriel would be ashamed of him, using the mechanics he’d so patiently taught him like this, but Wyatt ignored that thought. Gabriel was off getting his masters in Europe and being a fancy art person. He wasn’t here.

But Flynn was. And Wyatt missed him like a fucking limb.

“What if he doesn’t show up?” he asked.

“He’ll show up.”

“What if he’s angry with me? What if he never wants to see me again? What if—”

“What if I fucking kick your ass, you piece of _shit_ ,” Flynn said.

Wyatt whipped around, nearly falling on his ass.

Holy shit. Flynn had gotten— _fuck_.

He’d hit a final growth spurt since Wyatt had seen him last, but unlike the last one he hadn’t only gotten taller. He’d filled out, gotten broad in the shoulders and chest, his hands and feet and head no longer too big but proportionate, and now he moved in his body like he actually knew how, like he was comfortable with it instead of a dog tripping over its own paws. He’d started cutting his hair a bit, too, no longer letting it be that just-floppy-enough-to-look-scruffy length.

Flynn had gotten _hot_.

“I’d let you,” Wyatt blurted out, and he didn’t mean Flynn kicking his ass.

Flynn glared at him for a moment more and then yanked him into the tightest, most bone-crushing hug Wyatt had ever experienced in his life. “I should kill you,” Flynn said, but he sounded like he was going to cry. “Scaring the shit out of me.”

Wyatt wrapped his arms up around Flynn’s back, digging his nails in, feeling how solid Flynn had gotten. “He dragged me out of bed and I thought—I thought holy shit, he’s gonna kill me one day, and I couldn’t—so I ran out of there, and I—I drove his car into the lake.” Flynn tightened his grip. “Garcia, I drove his car into the lake. He’s going to murder me.”

“Jess said…” Flynn pulled back, taking Wyatt’s face in his hands. His fingers spanned all the way up Wyatt’s cheeks. Holy shit. “She said you’re running. You’re a runner.”

Wyatt nodded. “How else am I gonna look after myself? I’m a high school dropout, I got nothing.”

“You’re not a dropout.”

“I haven’t been to school in a month.”

“We can fix that.” Flynn shook him slightly. “Come on, Logan, work with me here. I can’t let you get arrested for drugs.”

“I can’t go home, Flynn, he’ll—”

“He won’t hurt you. I—I checked. He’s dead. The police came by and everything.”

Wyatt stared at him. He—Dad—what? “How?”

“Drank too much and had some kind of seizure. It—you don’t want to know, it wasn’t pretty.”

Part of Wyatt really did want to know. Part of him didn’t want to hear another word. “I still gotta run, Flynn. What else am I gonna do with my life?”

“Live with me.” Flynn’s hands slid down to Wyatt’s shoulders. “Live with me, my parents would love that, you can have Gabriel’s old room, c’mon, Logan, you practically live there anyway, just—”

He pulled Wyatt in again and Wyatt buried his face into Flynn’s neck, breathing him in, shit, _shit_ he’d missed him.

“Just stay with me,” Flynn whispered, like it hurt him to say it.

Dad was dead. Dad was _dead_. Dad couldn’t hurt him anymore.

“Okay,” Wyatt said, and his voice broke. His eyes were hot and itchy. “Flynn—” _I was so scared. I’ve been scared my whole life. I got so used to it that I don’t know how not to be scared._

Flynn held him tighter, as if to say, _I know_.

* * *

Mom and Papa didn’t ask what Wyatt had been up to. But Flynn heard Mom crying in her room that night, crying in a way he’d rarely heard from her, if at all. He’d known that Mom had lost people she loved, that the world hadn’t always been kind to her, but she had never bowed or broken before it. To hear her sounding like that, like her heart was breaking, was so foreign to him that he almost pinched himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

Papa murmured to her, half in English, half in Croatian, low enough that Flynn couldn’t make out the words. But Mom’s voice was loud enough to hear.

“He’s still a _child_ , Asher, no child should have to do all that—I should’ve done something sooner, I should’ve taken care of him sooner—”

“And be taken to jail? Take a mother away from her sons?” Now Papa’s voice was rising. “Taking a life isn’t something done lightly, Maria, you can’t take it back. You can’t erase it. It’s one of the most permanent things there is.”

“I don’t regret it.” Mom sounded fierce, like a tiger baring its teeth. “Don’t you try and make me regret it, Asher.”

“I don’t. I wouldn’t.” Soft noises followed. Then, “He’s safe, now, Maria, he’s safe. That’s what matters.”

Flynn understood, then, what his mother had done, the sort of things she would do, to take care of the people she loved. And his only anger was that he hadn’t thought to do that, too. He was strong enough. He could’ve taken care of Jeb. Nobody would’ve suspected him.

Wyatt was going to be put up in Gabriel’s room, but that night he was in Flynn’s, curled up on Flynn’s bed like they were twelve all over again. Flynn crawled in with him.

“I heard from Mary Rawlins that the recruiter came,” Wyatt whispered. “If you take the test, you get to sleep in and you get donuts. I could sign up. You do a tour and they pay for your college, and I won’t get in any other way, and—”

“You’re not going into the fucking army,” Flynn growled. He laid his head down. “You just got out of having your life in danger and you want to go right back in? Fuck that. I just got you back.”

A strange look crossed Wyatt’s face, and then he pressed himself in close to Flynn, nosing at Flynn’s neck, breathing him in. Flynn’s heart beat so hard that he thought for sure Wyatt would notice and say something about it, but Wyatt just stayed there, just like that.

Flynn draped his arm over Wyatt’s waist. “We’ll figure it out. You can do make up work. I’ll help you with homework. You’re not dumb, Wyatt. We’ll—you’re safe, and I’ll make sure you stay that way. I’m—I’m sorry I didn’t, before.”

“It’s not your job to,” Wyatt replied. Then he went a little stiff, like he’d realized something. “You called me Wyatt.”

“It’s your name, isn’t it?”

“You call me Logan. I call you Flynn. It’s our thing. Y’know.”

“Sorry, I can…”

“No, I mean, it’s fine, just. Startled me, that’s all. It—sounds good.”

Flynn wasn’t sure why he felt like he couldn’t breathe. Like he was struggling for each inhale. “Wyatt.” It seemed important that he repeat it.

“’S good.” Wyatt yawned. “Y’know you sound kind of like your dad’s accent, your voice? Always liked that.”

“When we were eleven you told me it made me sound like a wannabe gangster and not the clever kind.”

“I was eleven, I didn’t know jack shit.” Wyatt yawned again, then nuzzled in closer. Flynn’s heart stopped for a second and he felt like if he moved he would die. “Your voice is nice. Soothing.”

“Soothing?”

“Yeah.”

Wyatt fell asleep almost at once, but Flynn laid awake for a long time, his heart frantic, beating out a tune of _oh, oh, oh._

* * *

Asher folded over the newspaper, feeling the usual sensation of relief and shame. Relief that he hadn’t taken Maria and Gabriel back to Europe, relief that Gabriel and Garcia hadn’t had to grow up in a land that had been torn apart by war. Shame that he wasn’t there to help fight for independence, to watch his country be born, to do his part.

But he’d seen war, hot and cold ones, and he knew that the glory of it was a lie.

From upstairs, he heard a muffled but still obvious, “Fuck!”

Garcia was good at hiding his swearing around his parents. Wyatt was not.

“Need help with something?” Asher called.

There was silence upstairs.

He cared for Wyatt, and he knew Wyatt liked him, but he had long ago forced himself to accept the fact that Wyatt was probably never going to stop being skittish around him.

“I’m okay!” Wyatt called down.

“All right. Just let me know.”

He opened up the paper again. There had to be something that could help Wyatt. He was scared the state would take him away if they weren't careful, still paranoid after all this time, and frankly Asher understood—they were lucky that child services hadn't shown up and that the local police were so damn lazy that they accepted Wyatt living with the Flynns as a solution to the issue, and they only had to hold out for another two years, until Wyatt turned eighteen. But it would help if Wyatt had something other than school. Garcia had drama, and his history club thing, and whenever he was without Garcia, Wyatt would wander around like a lost ghost.

His eye landed on a classified ad, someone looking for a classic car, and he remembered how Gabriel had showed Wyatt about fixing up his own car. Wyatt had already known a lot, Asher recalled, something about his father forcing him to fix his old pickup.

Asher set the paper down and went upstairs, knocking on the door to Garcia’s room. Supposedly, Wyatt lived in Gabriel’s old room, but he really camped out in Garcia’s. Maria insisted that Garcia had told her the two boys were just friends and Garcia had never lied to his mother but, Asher still sometimes wondered…

“Wyatt?” he asked, opening the door and sticking his head in.

Garcia and Wyatt were sprawled out on the floor, doing homework. In a pile next to Wyatt were several crumpled-up balls of paper, probably the reason for his swearing a moment ago. His head shot up as Asher stuck his head in. “Yes?”

It had taken him forever to break Wyatt of the habit of saying _sir_ and Asher could still hear the ghost of it at the end of every sentence Wyatt used in addressing him.

“I heard the mechanic shop in town might need an apprentice. What do you say we stop by there this weekend? Gabriel always said you had a gift for it.”

Wyatt flushed bright red. “He did?”

Garcia scowled, looking exactly like his mother in that moment, and Asher had to bite hard on the inside of his cheek to hide his amusement. Maria was always saying that Garcia looked like his father but Asher knew Garcia was all Maria on the inside and that showed up in his mannerisms.

He wouldn’t have it any other way. Nothing delighted him more than seeing parts of one person he loved shining out in the other.

“Gabriel compliments everyone,” Garcia muttered.

Wyatt whipped his head around to glare at him. “What, you think I’m not any good?”

“Yeah, you’re good!” Garcia snapped, defensive. “You’re always good with your hands. You could build our whole set if you wanted.”

“Then why haven’t you asked me to?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to, you made fun of me for wearing tights and said if I held up a skull you’d puke.”

“No, I said if you held up a skull I’d fall asleep in the front row, I _said_ I’d puke if you kiss Maisy Holloway.”

“I’m not going to kiss her, the whole point of the relationship between Ophelia and—”

“So Wyatt is going to help build the set, I take it?” Asher said mildly.

“Yes!” Both boys said aggressively, glaring at each other.

Asher was quite grateful he liked women. Boys were impossible. “Wyatt, would you like me to drive you down to the shop this weekend?”

Garcia was already talking about what he wanted to do when he was an adult, where he wanted to go to college, how he wanted to study history. Gabriel swept in every holiday full of stories about his life in Europe. Wyatt never talked about anything like that. Asher needed him to know he had a future, even if it wasn’t the same sort of future as Gabriel and Garcia, and that it was okay. If nothing else, this would give him some money to save. That never hurt.

“You mean it?” Wyatt asked.

Asher nodded. “Of course.”

The corner of Wyatt’s mouth curled upward, pulling his mouth into a slightly buck-toothed grin, and for a second he looked so young and puppyish that Asher’s heart ached for him. He wanted to go back to when Wyatt was twelve and had first started coming to their house and insist on hugging him, cuddling him, making Wyatt feel less afraid of reaching for love.

“I’d love that, thank you Asher.”

Asher winked at him. “Of course.”

* * *

Flynn paced back and forth, working on his lines, because walking around seemed to be the only way he memorized anything. Wyatt was out at work, which was good, it was good that Wyatt had a job, but did it have to be on the weekends? When they were already so busy? Did it…

Fuck, he wasn’t paying attention. Flynn cleared his throat.

“If you wear a hole in the floor, you’re paying for the replacement,” Papa noted, moving around him to get into the kitchen.

Flynn rolled his eyes.

“I saw that.”

“Saw what?” Flynn said innocently.

Papa’s back was still to him. “Being a father comes with mind reading powers, did anyone tell you?”

“Oh yeah? Then what am I thinking about right now?” He felt a bit contrary.

Papa opened the cupboards, scowling a little, looking for something. “If your mother ate all of the Girl Scout cookies again…” he muttered. “You’re thinking about Wyatt not being here.”

Flynn’s heart gave an awful lurch. Fuck. “What makes you say that?”

“Your James Dean impression grows by ten when he’s not around.”

“You think you’re so funny.”

“I know I’m funny. Just ask your mother. It’s how she fell in love with me.”

“I distinctly recall it being other things,” Mom said as she passed behind them, smacking her husband’s ass for good measure because Mom was shameless and had no problem fucking scarring her children.

“Mom!” Flynn balked. “I don’t need to hear this! Or see that!”

“They’re in the freezer, darling,” Mom added to Papa.

Papa immediately opened the freezer, found the Thin Mints, and hissed in triumph. Mom laughed and then went upstairs.

“My point,” Papa went on, “is that your mood improves greatly when Wyatt’s around.”

“He helps me with my lines, that’s all.”

“I can help you with your lines.”

Flynn passed his copy of the play over.

“You’re missing my point, I think,” Papa said quietly. He looked down at the play and read one of Flynn’s lines. “Methinks the lady doth protest overmuch.”

Flynn felt his face heating up. “There’s nothing to protest.”

“If you say so.” Papa flipped through the play some more. “This above all: to thine own self be true.”

“Okay, that doesn’t mean what everyone thinks it means, it means that you should only be loyal to yourself and to backstab everyone else and play both sides, it doesn’t mean—”

“Yes, yes, I’ve read it.” Papa’s smile was a bit sardonic. “But taken out of context or not, it’s a good line.” He set the play down. “That’s all I want, Garcia. For you to be who you are. Whatever that means. Whoever that means.”

Flynn strained his ears but couldn’t hear Mom upstairs. He leaned back onto the kitchen counter. “I think Mom knows. She asked me—if we were—” He swallowed. He knew his parents loved him, no matter what, so why did this still feel like there was an anvil sitting on his chest? “We’re not. But I… I’d want, if he wanted, I’d—” He swallowed again. “I don’t feel like Hamlet. I feel like Horatio. Like I’m the one… standing there watching the person I care about most in the world go crazy and I couldn’t, can’t, do anything. And I’m going to be left at the end.”

Papa leaned over and gently brushed Flynn’s hair back from his face. “You are a little dramatic, _dragi_.”

“Mom would say I get that from you.”

Papa chuckled and withdrew his hand. “Does Wyatt not…”

“Wyatt likes girls.” And Gabriel. But Flynn only suspected that. “And even if he—he told me he’s not sure about college. He considered joining the fuc—fudging army, I mean I shut that bu—nonsense down in two seconds but he considered it. He’s trying really hard but he’s scared he can’t graduate on time. And I’m—I want to go somewhere, I want to get out of here at least for a little while, I want to travel and study history and—it wouldn’t, how’d we make it work?”

“You’re asking the former spy who married the NASA scientist,” Papa replied dryly. “If you’re asking for someone to tell you that you’re right and to not even try, you’re horribly mistaken.”

Flynn found himself smiling, the weight on his chest lifting a little. “Doesn’t change that he doesn’t—y’know. I’m not going to ruin our friendship.”

Papa looked amused at that. “Well. If nothing else, I wanted you to know… this doesn’t change anything, Garcia. I love you.” He paused. “And I won’t make you spy on Wyatt while I watch from the sidelines with my evil boss.”

“Yeah, Mom definitely married you for your looks,” Flynn said, snatching the play back.

* * *

Wyatt scrunched up his face in concentration as he worked the saw, carefully following the lines drawn onto the wood. This was, eventually, going to become a castle for the ramparts so that a ghost could appear and everyone could wonder whether or not they should kill someone else and something about a play within a play—Shakespeare made no fuckin’ sense, the guy was on drugs or something.

He stopped the saw and pulled off the plastic glasses that protected his face, blowing off the sawdust.

It was only then that he noticed Flynn standing there.

“Jesus tap-dancing Christ!” Wyatt yelled, jumping. “Warn a guy!”

“I didn’t want to interrupt you earlier and have you hurt yourself,” Flynn said, shrugging.

He was wearing his black turtleneck again, because Flynn almost always wore black and was allergic to actual color or something, and because he thought it made him look more serious or whatever. Wyatt thought Flynn looked good in just about anything, but he wasn’t going to argue.

“So what’s up?” Wyatt asked, setting the glasses down and brushing the sawdust off his clothes. “You guys all finished in the theatre?”

“Yeah, about ten minutes ago. But you knew that because you snuck in and watched.”

“Did not. I don’t even understand the gibberish you guys are saying.”

“Right, that’s why I see you up on the back row on the floor every time.”

Wyatt fought down his blush and went to grab his stuff. His grades were getting better but he was still most comfortable here, in the shop, or at the car garage. He was really making headway there, the guys liked him, the owner kept asking where the fuck Wyatt had been all this time. It made him feel like he was actually able to contribute to something for once.

Yeah, so he snuck out into the theatre to watch Flynn perform. What about it? He couldn’t understand the words but he could understand the emotions. And sure, it was teenagers, none of them were brilliant actors, but Wyatt just liked watching Flynn. Flynn cared so much, he put in so much work, and he loved being on stage. It made him happy, and Wyatt liked watching Flynn be happy.

Besides, it was the only time he could stare at Flynn for over an hour without anyone noticing it.

Sometimes, he wanted to tell Flynn. _I like boys, and girls._ But what if Flynn hated him? What if Flynn called him all the awful things that Jake Nelson did? What if Flynn said Wyatt was disgusting?

Yeah, it was 1999, the millennium was coming up, people were saying Y2K was gonna be the end of the world and he knew that being gay or whatever he was, was fine. He watched the news, read the paper, tried to surf online on the family computer in the basement when everyone else was asleep. He saw people marching and chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” he saw the rainbow flags, he got it, really, he did.

But that was New York City, and Washington D.C., and Los Angeles and San Francisco. It wasn’t Texas. It wasn’t small towns, or even middle-sized towns.

And it didn’t matter if the entire rest of the world thought queer, and gay, and all of that, was okay. It didn’t matter, if his best friend didn’t think so.

“You okay?” Flynn asked. “You look like—you got something on your mind.”

Wyatt zipped up his backpack and hefted it over his shoulder, shrugging. “Nothing.”

“Logan, I’ve known you since you thought ‘then why don’t you marry it’ was the best comeback ever. I know when you’ve got something you’re thinking about.”

Wyatt shrugged again. “Not really. I mean. Maybe. I don’t… um… you ever wanted to say something, only you didn’t know how to say it, but at the same time you had to say it or you’d just fuckin’… burst or something?”

Flynn nodded. “Yeah.” His gaze carefully searched Wyatt’s face. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

Wyatt took a deep breath. “You… you remember when I made you go with me to see every single James Bond film, including the last one that you said was ridiculous and made no sense even though you were glad they finally had a woman be the criminal mastermind?”

“Yeah? James Bond is stupid. And why is the Eastern European guy always the villain?” Flynn grouched.

“I don’t want to see those films because—because I think they’re good.” He might throw up. “I want to see them because—because James Bond is—I want to see them for the reason all the other boys see them, but they’re looking at, y’know, Elektra King and Paris Carver, and I’m looking at… y’know, I’m looking at…” He gestured lamely, unable to finish the sentence.

Flynn stared at him. “But you dated Jess,” he said. “You were in love with Jess.”

“Yeah, I was.” Wyatt’s face felt so hot he felt like you could fry an egg on it. “You can like both, apparently. That’s what the internet says.”

Flynn was silent for a long moment, and Wyatt felt sick. “If—if you don’t want to be my friend anymore—”

“Fuck you, of course I want to be your friend!” Flynn burst out, his cheeks going pink. “I—I always suspected, you know, since you’ve got a massive crush on Gabriel—”

“What? Fuck _you_ , man, I haven’t had a crush on Gabriel in years!” _Not since I went away and you got all hot, you moron._ The moment this play performed, every girl was gonna have a crush on Flynn, Wyatt just knew it and he already was bracing himself to hate every second of it.

Flynn looked like this was news to him. “You haven’t?”

“No!”

“Why not, he’s handsome!”

“You’re seriously asking me to have a crush on your brother when I had to listen to you complain for literal years about everyone having a crush on your brother.”

“Touché.” Flynn’s face was still pink and he looked away. “Um. Me too. You know.”

Wyatt stared. He couldn’t have understood that properly. “What?”

“Men. Women. Yeah. Um. Great. Both of them.” Flynn cleared his throat. “Just so you know. I know—nobody else can know, but. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you but I didn’t want you to…”

“…to hate me,” Wyatt finished.

Flynn nodded.

Wyatt felt something warm slide down his face and realized he was crying. “Fuck, man, I thought—I was so scared you were going to—yeah.”

“Oh no.” Flynn sounded horrified and he quickly enveloped Wyatt in a hug. Wyatt pretended to hate how tall Flynn had gotten but he was the perfect height for Wyatt to tuck his head under Flynn’s chin and feel wrapped up and properly hugged. Safe. Content.

“You’re my best friend,” Flynn whispered. “Wyatt. _Wyatt_. You’re my best friend. If you’re like, I don’t know, Captain Kirk and just want to sleep with weird aliens or if you don’t ever want to be with anybody, I wouldn’t care. You’ll always have me.”

 _Sometimes I think you’re the first person I ever learned how to love._ “Right back at you. You’ll always—yeah. I’m always going to be—you make me feel safe.”

Flynn would know what a compliment that was. How much that meant.

“This won’t… this doesn’t… change anything, does it?” Wyatt asked.

“It doesn’t have to.”

Wyatt breathed Flynn in, feeling himself relax. “Good,” he murmured, pressing in as close as he could.

Flynn went stiff for a second, but then relaxed, holding Wyatt tightly. Wyatt never wanted to leave this moment, right here.

“…can we go home though, I’m starving.”

Wyatt laughed and pulled back to look up into Flynn’s face, grinning. Flynn was grinning right back at him. “Yeah, you gangly asshole.”

Flynn rolled his eyes, hauling Wyatt by the collar out of the shop, casually manhandling him the way that he always did, and Wyatt felt like that poor cow caught up in that stupid tornado movie, floating and spinning, lifted clear off the ground, for the first time letting himself think the words, _fuck I’m so in love with you._

* * *

Wyatt was underneath a car when someone rapped their knuckles on the hood. “Hey, know where I could find this one idiot? Blond, stupid, has the redeeming quality of being able to change a tire?”

He shoved himself out from underneath. “You know you don’t have to roast me every time you see me.”

Jess grinned down at him. “Did you see the posters all over the school?”

“The ones about our yearbook?”

“No, you moron. The ones for prom! You gotta get your prom tickets!”

Wyatt stared at her. “It’s just junior prom, Jess, nobody even fucking goes to that.”

“But it’s the perfect opportunity.” She knelt down next to him on the concrete of the auto shop. “If you want to ask someone out.”

Wyatt sat up, wincing as it made his abs burn. Working in the shop was doing wonders for his ability to lift weights but it also left him fucking exhausted. “Jess. We fought for two weeks, broke up, got back together, and then broke up again. Are you telling me you want to actually get back—”

“What? Are you insane?” Jess stared at him like he’d genuinely lost his goddamn mind. “Wyatt, no, I’m saying you should ask Flynn out!”

Wyatt stared at her, got well acquainted with the feeling of total, complete panic, and then lay back down and slid himself back under the car.

“Wyatt, you coward, get back out from under there!”

“I’m not asking—why the fuck would I ask Flynn out? What do I look like, huh?” His stomach churned.

Jess seized his ankles and yanked him back out. Wyatt yelped. Fuck, she was surprisingly strong, when did that happen!?

Jess glared at him. “Wyatt. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. Do you think I want to get both him and me killed? The shit beat out of us?”

“Nobody would have to _know_ , Wyatt, Jesus. But it’s a good excuse to ask him.”

“I’m not asking him anything.” His face, his chest, all of him burned. “Flynn—have you seen him lately? He could have literally anyone, all the girls are making goo-goo eyes at him and he’s not gonna—just because he’s into—” Wyatt lowered his voice. “— _men_ , doesn’t mean he’s into me!”

Jess groaned. “Wyatt. Please. Flynn thinks you’re the cutest goddamn thing in the world. He thinks you’re more adorable than a baby golden retriever.”

“Thanks, Jess, it really helps a guy’s ego to be told he’s cute.”

“I give up.” Jess stood up. “You want to be miserable forever? Don’t ask him.”

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

She stormed off and Wyatt shoved himself back under the car, still feeling far too hot all over.

No. No way.

* * *

Flynn jumped as a bunch of books crashed next to him at his desk in the library. “Jess!” he hissed, looking up and realizing who it was. “What the hell?”

“Garcia! Just the man I was hoping to see.” Jess slid into the seat across from him.

Flynn glared. “Some of us have history exams to study for.”

“You don’t have a history exam. You’re just reading up on it because you’re a nerd.”

It was true. Flynn loved history. It just fascinated him. It had started when Papa was explaining what the war for independence was, why Croatia was being created, and what all those people were fighting for. And it had just spun out into this web—if this happened because of this, and this happened because of that, and so on—and soon he’d been devouring history books like nobody’s business.

“Okay, maybe that’s true.” He closed his book. “But that doesn’t mean you get to just—this is the library, you’re supposed to be quiet!”

Jess smirked at him. “So. Who are you asking to prom?”

“…what?”

“Prom. Junior prom. The posters up everywhere?”

“That’s happening?”

“Yes, you—it’s happening in two weeks!” Jess looked appalled. “How have you not noticed?”

“I’ve kind of been thinking about other things!” Like schoolwork, and what colleges he wanted to go to, because he had to start applying for those next year, and _fuck_.

“Other things?” Jess waggled her eyebrows and leaned in. “Like blond, freckled, puppy-cute things?”

Flynn stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

Jess looked like she was considering smacking her head onto the desk. “Wyatt! I’m talking about Wyatt and your massive crush on him that can be seen from space!”

“What—when the—” Flynn leaned in. “When the fuck did you figure that out?”

“I love how you’re not trying to deny it. Classy. Bold. Good choice.” Jess’s smirk took up her entire face.

“Seriously, how did you figure it out?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Garcia? Maybe it was the big adoring stare you always give him? Or the way you find every excuse to touch him? Maybe it was the fact that you had him practice your Hamlet and Horatio scenes and I haven’t seen so much homoerotic tension since _Star Trek_?” Jess paused. “Or possibly _due South_.”

“I don’t even know what that second one is.”

“You would if you ever watched television.”

“I watch television!”

“My point,” Jess said, poking the table with her index finger, “is that you are obvious, Garcia Flynn. So just end my misery and ask him out.”

Flynn shoved Jess’s stack of books aside so that he could lean in even closer. “Jess. I’ve grown up with the guy, okay, and I’ve never seen him… look at me like… like that, or talk about me like that.”

“You might have grown up with him,” Jess conceded, “but you didn’t date him. I did. I know what he does and how he behaves when he likes someone. I think you have a shot. And what could it hurt?”

Flynn sat up and spread his arms out, his hands going vertical. “Oh, I don’t know, Jess, only losing my best friend, I suppose?”

Jess lowered her face to the desk and groaned. “You’re giving me an ulcer.”

He patted the top of her head. “I hear there are operations for that.”

Without raising her head, Jess flipped him off.

* * *

Now that he was aware of it, prom was fucking everywhere, holy shit.

Wyatt hated it.

Every time he turned a corner some guy was doing some big dramatic thing for a girl to ask her out and the girl was squealing and saying yes (or, in a couple of horrible cases, looking humiliated and saying no). Everyone was talking about what they were going to wear. Guys were freaking out over what corsage to get their date, girls were freaking out over their hair, and every gender was talking about prom night sex.

“Jess and I did some stuff, I don’t see why everyone’s insisting on waiting for prom night,” he said at one point, and Flynn looked like he was genuinely considering hanging himself from the tree on their hill.

It was ‘their’ hill in Wyatt’s mind, even if he’d never dare say that out loud.

Honestly, what was the big deal about prom? It was only as big of a thing as everyone made it out to be. In reality, far as he could tell, it was just another chance for everyone to dress up and then awkwardly sway to the music while the disapproving parents who’d been strong-armed into chaperoning stood around.

When he said all this to Flynn, very passionately, while pacing back and forth under the tree one night, Flynn surprised him with his response.

“Then let’s not go.”

Wyatt stopped pacing and stared at him. “Not go?”

Flynn didn’t seem to like any girls, which, thank fuck for that, because if Wyatt’d had to deal with listening to Flynn prepare to ask someone out to prom, he would’ve laid down in the middle of Main St and waited for the first car to run him over. But date or no, he’d assumed that Flynn would still want to go.

All the girls who stared anxiously and hopefully at Flynn whenever he walked past them sure wanted Flynn to go, too.

“I mean, we can if you want to,” Flynn replied, “but you don’t seem to want to, so.” He shrugged. “Let’s just have our own night. Hang out. Do something fun.”

“Like what?”

“Sneak into an R rated movie at the theater?” They weren’t seventeen yet and Asher was strict about violence in movies. “Steal something from the liquor cabinet and drink it out here? Blast music from the car and see who’s got the stupidest dance moves?”

It sounded… perfect. Terrifyingly perfect. “You sure you wouldn’t want to go to prom?”

Flynn shook his head. “Nah. Besides, if I want, we’ve got another one next year.” He looked at Wyatt, and Wyatt swore he could see the stars reflected in Flynn’s eyes, two miniature galaxies. “What do you say, Logan? Should we be losers and ditch prom?”

Wyatt grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, we should.”

* * *

Flynn didn’t steal the liquor from the cabinet.

He asked Gabriel, who was visiting, if he could please please _please_ buy them a little alcohol, _please_.

“We won’t drink and drive,” Flynn pleaded, following Gabriel around the house as Gabriel tried to find… something or other from his childhood that he wanted to take back with him to France. “We’re literally just gonna go out to our hill and stargaze. And then sleep in the car. Please?”

Gabriel headed down into the basement and rummaged through some shelves while Flynn followed him like a hopeful duckling. Gabriel always managed to make Flynn feel too tall, too gangly, too awkward, even though he knew he was starting to grow into his body a bit. Gabriel was just… so effortlessly cool, and Flynn was never going to be that, no matter how much he tried to match Gabriel’s saunter and Gabriel’s sass.

At least Wyatt didn’t have a crush on Gabriel anymore. That had been torture.

Gabriel pushed back from the shelves and sighed. “Look. I am only going to say this once.” He had a slight accent now, from living in France. Asher playfully made fun of him for it, while Gabriel teased him right back for his lingering Slavic accent. “I trust you. You’ve always been a responsible person, Garcia. But if I do this? And you get in trouble? I will murder you. Are we clear?”

“Crystal,” Flynn said. “You are the best brother ever.”

“I’m the best enabler, is what I am,” Gabriel muttered, looking so much like Mom in that moment that Flynn could only grin harder.

* * *

Wyatt groaned as he followed Flynn’s lead. “I don’t see why I have to close my eyes.”

“Because it’s a surprise, asshole.”

They’d snuck in to see _The Matrix_ , which was cool as fuck but also kind of messed with Wyatt’s head a little, and then Flynn had driven them out to their hill, insisting as they drew closer that Wyatt close his eyes. Now Flynn was leading him by the hand, clutching their six pack in his other hand, and Wyatt’s stomach was doing an odd flipping thing over and over.

“Sorry it’s just beer, Gabriel said he wasn’t going to get us anything stronger.”

“It’s okay.” Beer reminded him of Dad, of that awful smell on his breath, of his temper, but Wyatt figured having one or two wouldn’t hurt. Just tonight. With Flynn. Flynn made everything better.

“All right.” Oddly, Wyatt could sense light on the other side of his eyelids. “Open.”

Wyatt opened his eyes.

Their tree was all lit up.

Flynn had, somehow, strung Christmas lights from the garage through the tree, the white Christmas lights because Maria liked to do their house up all in white and silver every year, and it took Wyatt a moment to realize Flynn had jury-rigged the lights to get their power from the goddamn car motor, which was still running. Gabriel must’ve told him how to do that.

“Now we’ve got, um, better lighting than just the headlights,” Flynn explained. He let go of Wyatt’s hand, smiling softly. “D’you like it?”

Wyatt had never wanted to kiss someone so badly in his life. “Yeah, I love it, man, this is awesome.”

Flynn ran a hand through his hair, looking pleased as fuck. “So…”

“So?” Wyatt gestured to the six pack in Flynn’s hand. “Pass one over and crank up the tunes, c’mon!”

Flynn passed over the beer and walked back to the car, and a moment later music filtered out. But it wasn’t the radio.

“…did you make a fucking CD.”

“No,” Flynn replied, walking back to him. “I made a fucking mixtape. This car doesn’t have a CD player.”

“You’re a goddamn nerd, Flynn.”

“Says the guy smiling.” Flynn took a beer from the pack and winked at Wyatt, and oh, God, he was in so much fucking trouble.

Wyatt had never had alcohol before, despite some parties he and Flynn had gone to. His dad drank too much, and Wyatt was terrified that somewhere, deep inside of him, was a piece of his dad that would betray him and turn him ugly and violent once he had some alcohol.

So it turned out, one beer was all he needed to get tipsy.

Flynn sometimes had a bit of Maria’s wine at dinner, just a sip or two, and last year he’d had a tiny glass of eggnog for New Year’s, so he had two. But then he was stumbling the same amount Wyatt was, and when he yanked Wyatt to his feet to dance, they were stepping on each other’s toes like amateurs.

“We fucking suck at this,” Wyatt said, working to get his tongue to cooperate.

“Yeah but we look good doing it.” Flynn struck a pose and Wyatt burst out laughing.

“You look like the world’s biggest dork.”

“Speak for yourself, Logan.”

“Wyatt,” Wyatt insisted. He pouted. “I like when you call me _Wyatt_.”

“Wyatt,” Flynn repeated. They were standing awfully close. And not really moving anymore. “Wyatt, Wyatt, Wyatt.”

Something—things, multiple things, that his dad had said were trying to swim their way to the surface, to remind him of something, something important, but he couldn’t remember what they were. _Real men, real men didn’t_ —but Dad was gone and Dad was a shit person, and this felt _good_ , it couldn't be so bad if it felt good… and Flynn was warm, and he wanted to press in close, and Flynn’s eyes were like stars, and Wyatt had always loved the sky.

Flynn’s arms slid around his waist and a part of Wyatt was ringing the alarm bells but it was muffled. “Jess was wrong,” Flynn said quietly.

“Oh?”

Flynn knocked their foreheads together. The song that was playing was something… something with a guitar, something about fireflies, and the silver moon.

“You’re not… you’re not cute,” Flynn said. “You’re pretty.”

“’M not pretty,” Wyatt replied. “I’m… hot. Okay?”

Flynn’s smile was lopsided. “That too.”

And then they were kissing.

Flynn tasted a bit like beer, but it was okay because it was _Flynn_ , and his hands were warm and solid and somehow underneath Wyatt’s shirt, and his hair was soft underneath and between Wyatt’s fingers, and there was nobody watching but the stars and he loved, loved, _loved_ —

Flynn tasted like beer.

Flynn was _drunk_.

Shit, fuck, shit, Flynn was—he wasn’t gonna—he didn’t want this and Wyatt was ruining everything and shit, _shit_ —

Wyatt yanked himself back, ripped himself away, and Flynn stared at him. The song was ending, chanting like a mantra, like Wyatt’s heart, _so kiss me, so kiss me, so kiss me_ , but he couldn’t, he _couldn’t_.

“You—fuck.” If anyone found out, anyone at all, they’d be dead for sure. They’d go after Flynn, and hurt him, and they’d only just stopped calling him all those racist-ass names and shit… “We shouldn’t have, shit, Flynn, I’m sorry—”

“What are you apologizing for?”

“I didn’t mean it!” Wyatt blurted out wildly. “I didn’t mean it, it’s okay.”

Flynn stared at him. “You didn’t mean it,” he repeated.

Wyatt nodded vigorously.

Flynn wiped at his mouth, staring up at the sky, like he was waiting for the stars to give him an answer. “Right. You didn’t mean it. I’ll just—I’ll just. Good to know, right, good to know.” He nodded, as if to himself. “I’m gonna…”

He gestured, as if at something that Wyatt couldn’t see, and then turned and walked away.

Wyatt sat down heavily on the ground, underneath the tree, still glowing with lights, and watched Flynn’s retreating back. He looked up at the night sky.

It looked back at him.

Shit.

* * *

They didn’t really talk for three days.

Wyatt somehow, despite living in the same house with him, managed to avoid him. It was kind of impressive, actually. Flynn was grudgingly impressed. He knew that the others could tell. Mom was worried. Papa didn’t say anything but at breakfast he laid his hand on Flynn’s shoulder as if to silently remind him that he could talk to him at any time.

Gabriel was not nearly so subtle.

“Hide your skin mags,” he announced as he pranced into Flynn’s bedroom.

“Nobody calls them that anymore,” Flynn replied, closing his book about Washington’s spy ring. “And what do you want?”

“I wanted to know why you’re all mopey and Wyatt’s doing an excellent job at being the Invisible Man,” Gabriel replied.

Flynn got up and shoved past his brother, heading downstairs to find something, anything, to distract himself.

“C’mon, Garcia, I might not be around a lot but I know something’s wrong. You two aren’t speaking, that’s never happened in the entire time I’ve known you two.” Gabriel pitched his voice low. “Lover’s quarrel?”

That did it. Flynn spun around, surprised at his own venom. “Don’t you mock that, okay? Don’t you dare!”

Gabriel blinked in surprise. “Okay. No more jokes about that, got it. But you’ve been avoiding everyone. Including Mom and Dad. And I don’t know what your latest fight with Wyatt is but it’s not their fault.”

“Well it doesn’t help when Mom and Papa are like—that!” Flynn hissed through his teeth, gesturing through the doorway to where, sure enough, his parents could be seen waltzing around the kitchen.

They’d done that ever since Flynn was little. Asher would put music on the radio and pull Maria in, and they’d sway together, Asher giving her the occasional twirl that had her hair flying and a bright smile flaring to life across her face. Now, though, there was no twirling. Mom had her head resting on Papa’s chest, her arms around his neck, and they were softly moving together across the linoleum floor.

They were older, Flynn realized. There were touches of gray in Papa’s hair and deeper lines around Mom’s mouth and eyes. He’d been picturing them the way he’d seen them when he was a child, fresh-faced and handsome, and they both still were but Flynn was nearly seventeen and Gabriel had been a grown-ass adult for years and their parents were—they were old.

Or older, anyway.

Older and still in love.

“What do Mom and Dad have to do with you and Wyatt?” Gabriel asked, because Gabriel was absolutely impossible.

Flynn glared at him. “Are you fucking with me?”

“For possibly the first time in your life, no, I am not.” Gabriel did the ‘scout’s honor’ salute even though Gabriel had been to one Boy Scout meeting and promptly got kicked out.

Flynn glanced over to make sure Mom and Papa weren’t looking, then grabbed his brother and dragged him into the basement. “Wyatt and I ditched prom, and we went up to our hill, and things got—carried away, and we kissed. But Wyatt said that it didn’t mean anything.”

“And it meant something to you,” Gabriel said slowly.

Flynn nodded.

Gabriel leaned back against some shelves. “How long have you liked him?”

That wasn’t the question Flynn had been expecting. “I don’t even know. Feels like forever, sometimes.”

“Okay. Why haven’t you… I’m guessing you didn’t ask him out properly or anything.”

“No. I never meant to—we were tipsy, and we ended up dancing and just, one thing led to another.”

“So why did you never ask him out, if you’ve loved him all this time?”

“I didn’t want to ruin anything.” Flynn made a _ta-da_ motion with his hands.

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Garcia, that kid looks at you like you hung the fucking moon. If you didn’t tell him how you felt, if you only kissed him when you had alcohol in you, don’t you think maybe the idiot—because he is an idiot, and I say that with love—thought that it was a mistake on your part?”

“Wyatt doesn’t…”

“Wyatt once dropped a socket wrench on my head because you walked past us without a shirt on while we were in the garage. He’s into you. Trust me. I’m French, I know these things.”

“You’re Mexican and Irish, asshole, just because you’ve lived in France for a few years…”

Gabriel waved his hand in the air. “Semantics. I know love. That boy’s head over heels for you. God only knows why.” He winked at Flynn to show he was joking about that last part. “I’m serious, Garcia. A drunken kiss does not prove jack shit to someone. Tell him how you feel. At this point, what do you have to lose?”

Flynn mulled that over. All right, so maybe Gabriel had a point, but… “If this backfires I am going to murder you.”

“Oh how the tables turn,” Gabriel murmured, amused. “Fair enough, _mon frere_.”

“I hate you when you quote French, I hate you so much.”

* * *

She found Wyatt underneath the hood of her car, checking out the engine even though Maria knew full well that there was nothing wrong with it.

“I thought I might find you here,” she said, rapping on the hood of the car. “Wyatt. Would you like something to eat? I don’t think you had breakfast.”

“’M fine.”

“Wyatt.” After being married to Asher, who was stubborn as a goddamn mule, and raising two boys both of whom had inherited her hotheadedness, she was used to getting firm with the men in her life. “Do me the courtesy of not pretending you’re good enough at lying to fool me.”

There was a pause from underneath the hood of the car, and then Wyatt pushed himself back and stood up, wiping his hands off. “Sorry, Maria,” he mumbled.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She was so tired, so very tired, of holding herself back around Wyatt. Especially now that he and Garcia were avoiding each other, not speaking to each other, for the first time since they’d met. Even when they’d hated each other as children, they’d been in each other’s faces, they’d never given each other space. “I’m not angry with you, I just want you to talk to me.”

Wyatt looked up at her, and he looked so young and small, her heart broke. “I can’t.”

“Why not, honey?”

Wyatt set his rag down and shrugged. “I messed up. And—and Flynn doesn’t want—and he’s your son. So.”

Maria took a deep breath. She had done far, far bigger things, far worse things, for those she loved. Somehow, this felt like one of the scariest. “You’re my son too, Wyatt.”

Wyatt stared at her. “…you…” He blinked rapidly and looked away, then forced his gaze back to her. “You mean that?”

Maria stepped forward, taking his face in her hands. He was taller than she was, now, although he didn’t tower over her like Garcia and Gabriel. “I should’ve taken you home for good years ago, Wyatt. I thought that might—make child services or the police come after us, after you, and make it all worse. But I should have made you stay when I first knew something was wrong. You’ve always been my boy, Wyatt. Same as Gabriel and Garcia.”

Tears slid down Wyatt’s face. “I want—but I didn’t want to—” He reached up to wipe at his eyes Maria finally gave in, pulling him against her for a hug.

She’d done this once or twice when he was little, but she wished she’d done it more. That she had cuddled him into her arms and made certain he felt loved. He should never have felt like she might pick Garcia over him, never have worried that he was less to her.

Wyatt stood there for a moment, and then slowly, like he still wasn’t sure if he could, he wrapped his arms around her, loosely at first, and then more tightly.

Maria gently stroked through the hair at the back of his neck with one hand, the other rubbing between his shoulder blades. Wyatt’s body heaved with heavy sobs, and Maria made soothing noises until the sobs subsided.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” she whispered. “It’s all right. You can tell me, whatever it is.”

“I messed it up,” Wyatt said, his voice thick. “I messed it all up and Garcia hates me.”

“Garcia could never hate you.” Garcia would find a way to fetch the moon for Wyatt if Wyatt wanted.

“But I did—on prom, I—I kissed him.” The last words were whispered so softly, and with such fear, that Maria almost thought she’d heard him wrong for a moment. “And then I—I freaked out on him and I ruined everything.”

“You didn’t ruin it, honey.”

“But I did, Mama I did and I love him so much and it hurts all the time and—”

Maria startled herself as a small sob shook her own chest, her eyes blurring. Wyatt paused. “…you okay? Am I—should I not’ve—y’know, said… do you think…”

She realized where his line of thinking went and she pulled back. “No, honey. You two have… you two have loved each other a long time. I’m not surprised at all. And I don’t care. I told Garcia, Asher and I don’t care. We love you just the same.”

“But you’re crying.”

Maria wiped at her eyes. “You called me Mama.”

Wyatt’s face went red. “I… I’m sorry, I just…” He looked down at the ground. “When I first met you, y’know, I thought you were an angel or something. I just never thought I was allowed to… I didn’t want to ask for things I couldn’t have, y’know?”

“You can call me Mama, or Mom, or whatever you want. And I don’t think Asher would mind if you called him something similar.”

Wyatt looked alarmed. “But Asher’s so—you know.”

The idea that people consistently found her husband intimidating never ceased to amuse her. “Asher has been waiting for you to let him hug you for years, Wyatt, he’d be delighted if you so much as asked him for help with your homework.”

Wyatt looked terribly embarrassed, face flushing again, and Maria laughed.

“Now, I’m not in the business of telling people’s secrets or guessing at people’s feelings,” she went on, squeezing Wyatt’s hands. “But I would bet everything I have that Garcia loves you the same as you love him. And that how you’re feeling right now is exactly the way that he’s feeling. Talk to him, Wyatt. That boy holds onto you like he’ll kill anything that tries to take you away.”

“I—I don’t think I’m worth—all that.”

Maria picked up the rag and used it to wipe off Wyatt’s face. “Yes you are, honey. Now go wash up because you need dinner.”

“Is Flynn…”

“He has rehearsal late.”

“Oh.”

Maria set the rag down. “But you’ll find a time to talk to him. Now scat, I raised my boys to come to the table with clean hands.”

Wyatt’s smile was wondrous, and tentative, and happy, and Maria only kicked herself that she hadn’t insisted on so much more, so much sooner.

* * *

Flynn knew that Wyatt could try and avoid him all he wanted, but there were two places where Wyatt had to be, consistently, where it was only a matter of time until Flynn found him there: the auto garage where Asher had helped Wyatt get a part-time job, and the shop at school where they made all the stuff for set.

Deciding that school was easier, and that it was more likely that Wyatt would be alone in there, Flynn found a quiet corner over by the paint cans and waited, trying to finish his essay on the Salem Witch Trials in the meantime.

He was just struggling how to conclude the damn thing when the door opened and Wyatt walked in, dumping his backpack onto the floor.

Wyatt looked exhausted. Well, he had to be, seeing as he was finding a way to somehow eat meals and get sleep in the same damn house as Flynn while keeping Flynn from seeing him at all. Flynn stood up so fast he accidentally knocked his supplies to the floor, and Wyatt yelped, jumping back, hands raising defensively, shoulders hunching.

Flynn’s heart broke all over again. It had been a year since he’d last seen his father, and Wyatt’s first instinct when startled was still to get ready to be hit.

“Relax, it’s just me,” Flynn said, and Wyatt instinctively flinched before realizing who it was and standing up, glaring.

“Do you have to lurk in the corner like that?”

“Always.”

Wyatt flipped him off. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to see you, dickhead, I don’t do my homework in this sawdust-covered hole just for fun.” Flynn walked over to him and noticed that Wyatt took a careful step back. Not like Wyatt was scared—Flynn had seen Wyatt scared plenty of times—but like Wyatt was maintaining distance because he felt he had to. “Look, can we talk?”

Wyatt looked a little pale. “Yeah, sure.” He folded his arms.

Flynn ran a hand through his hair. “Look. Um. I thought I was pretty—pretty obvious, but Gabriel told me that I wasn’t, and so I’m trying to… be really obvious, here.”

Wyatt stared at him, looking like he might bolt for the door. “Don’t you have rehearsal?” he asked, his voice high-pitched and strangled.

“Not for another—no, you’re not getting rid of me, and fuck rehearsal.” That all came out more strongly than he’d meant it to.

Wyatt gaped at him. “Did you just say _fuck rehearsal_? Am I talking to Garcia Flynn?”

“Wyatt…”

“Jess said _Hamlet_ was boring and you went off at her for an hour. An hour, Flynn! I timed it! You made a diagram with my notebook.”

“Wyatt—”

“You made a _diagram_.”

“You’re more important than rehearsal, okay!” Flynn bellowed.

Wyatt went quiet, his face flushing.

Flynn’s chest felt tight, and his eyes stung, and his hands were shaking, but he also felt like maybe this was the most important thing he’d ever done in his life. “If you hate me after this it’s—it’s fine. And we can—we can just go back to being friends and pretend that none of this ever happened. But I didn’t—you said okay to ditching prom and I think I spent the next week trying not to throw up because I was so… nervous and excited. I spent an hour looking for the Christmas lights in the garage. Gabriel had to show me three times how to hook them up to the car engine so they’d work. Jess helped me put them in the tree after I got tangled and nearly strangled myself with them when I fell out.”

“That would have been literally the worst way to die.”

“Thanks, Wyatt, glad to know that’s what you’re focusing on.”

“What am supposed to focus on, then!?”

“Maybe the fact that I did everything because I wanted to—to—” Flynn waved his hands in the air, words ready to burst out of his chest and yet not flying out of his mouth the way he wanted them to. “I wanted to take you to prom but I can’t, because I’m a guy, and so are you, and I was scared if I asked you that you’d say no, so I thought if I was… if I did it that way, you’d get the hint and you could either—keep your distance and that would be a no or you’d—and we—you danced with me, and we kissed, and I thought—I wanted to kiss you—”

“You were drunk! You’d had two beers!” Wyatt’s face was bright pink but he was looking Flynn in the eye for the first time in almost a week and Flynn felt like he’d started to fall off a cliff but that maybe, if he did it right, he’d fly instead.

“I wanted to kiss you before that! Way before that! For months and—oh fuck it,” he snapped, done with words, and he hauled Wyatt in and kissed him.

It wasn’t at all like the first kiss. That one had been like gravity was pulling them together, soft and slow to start out with. This one started like two planets colliding and only got more heated from there.

Flynn didn’t really have any experience with kissing aside from Maisy, who played Ophelia and had pulled him aside after their first rehearsal and spent an hour with him in the green room teaching him out to make out with someone. “Your future girlfriend will thank me,” she promised him, remarkably no-nonsense about the whole procedure.

Judging by the noises Wyatt was making, he either didn’t give a shit about Flynn’s inexperience, or Maisy had known what the fuck she was doing. Wyatt was a bit overeager to start with but Flynn coaxed him down by rubbing his back and petting Wyatt’s hair, nipping at his bottom lip occasionally as a kind of _slow down_ gesture.

Wyatt finally settled, let Flynn take the lead and _fuck_ , okay, yeah, that was good. That was really, really good.

When Flynn finally yanked his mouth back, struggling to breathe, Wyatt looked absolutely wrecked. Flynn felt about the same. Holy shit.

“I thought I’d ruined everything,” Wyatt whispered.

Flynn shook his head.

Wyatt stepped back up into Flynn’s space, their noses brushing. He was so pretty like this, with his pupils blown wide and his hair all mussed and his mouth red and slick. “What does this mean, then?”

Flynn wrapped an arm around him, and to his infinite pleasure, Wyatt let himself be dragged closer. “It means… we tell Jess, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“We don’t tell anyone else.”

“Obviously.”

“And when I finally get out of this damn town and to a really cool college in California or New York or somewhere, I tell people all about my boyfriend.”

Wyatt gave that crooked smile that made Flynn melt. “Your boyfriend?”

“Yeah. My boyfriend.”

Wyatt kissed him again, and this time he went nice and pliant immediately when Flynn took control, and Flynn was ten minutes late for rehearsal but he really didn’t give a shit.

* * *

Wyatt thought that Flynn was asleep. Flynn usually was when they went up to their hill nowadays. He was running himself ragged with nerves, figuring out where to go to college and then freaking out that he would never be able to do anything with a history degree and then freaking out that he’d be miserable in any other field and then freaking out over keeping his grades up…

Yeah. Wyatt was the one with a part-time job and he was getting more sleep than Flynn was.

So Wyatt didn’t disturb his boyfriend (his boyfriend, his _boyfriend_ ) and just kept staring up at the stars, his head on Flynn’s shoulder and his arm thrown across Flynn’s chest.

“D’you ever wonder,” Flynn rumbled, and Wyatt nearly jumped out of his own damn skin in surprise, “if there really is something up there?”

“Your mom thinks so.” He was still getting used to calling Maria _Mom_ , but it was worth it for how her face lit up.

Asher, well, Wyatt would always call him Asher. He wasn’t sure, but sometimes, when he did well on a test or talked about a car he fixed up at the garage, he’d see Asher with this look in his eyes that Wyatt almost, might, call pride.

Flynn hummed and fell silent again.

“What do you think?” Flynn asked after a few more minutes had passed.

Wyatt looked up at the stars, a twinkling roadmap. “Maybe something’s up there. Maybe there isn’t anything. Doesn’t really matter much to me. All the things I care about are down here.”

Flynn made a kind of warm almost-chuckle noise and threaded their fingers together. They couldn’t do this at school. Or out in town. Or anywhere, except in Flynn’s—their—room, and out here. Jess knew, and fucking crowed about it for hours, but who else could they possibly tell? Every time it would be a gamble, a Russian roulette only instead of five empty chambers and one bullet, it was five punches to the face and one _oh, okay, that’s fine with me_.

But here, at least, they could do whatever they wanted.

And someday, maybe, they wouldn’t have to hide anywhere. Every time Wyatt saw girls sighing over Flynn, he wanted to grab Flynn’s hand and say _this is my boyfriend_. Every time someone asked him if he’d ever done it with a cheerleader, he wanted to say, _no but I did it with the star of the school play_. Every time he saw couples cuddling, he wanted to cuddle too, to crawl up to Flynn and nuzzle Flynn’s neck and have Flynn wrap his arm around him and go, _your nose is cold like a puppy’s, seriously Wyatt, what the hell,_ but cuddle him anyway.

Someday, they’d get there. He had to believe that.

Wyatt turned away from the stars and pressed his face into Flynn’s neck. It was warm again, and soon summer would come, and senior year with all its stress. But right now there was just the warm darkness and the stars above and Flynn underneath him, like he’d always been.

* * *

Summer was the fucking best.

In summer there was no school (as much as he loved history and as much as the applause after their _Hamlet_ performance rang in his ears he did not miss the essays and panicked line memorization), no expectations, no responsibilities. In summer they could go driving out to this one lake to go swimming so they could horse around without anyone making fun, and sunbathe on the banks, and eat ice cream and he could lick the remains off Wyatt’s wrist and suck Wyatt’s fingers into his mouth just to watch Wyatt look like he was having a heart attack. In summer they could watch movies all day in the theater and sit in the back so they could whisper to each other, fingers tangling in the popcorn bucket. In the summer they could take the car out and Wyatt could let her rip and go tearing around in the dirt and on the old highways where nobody went anymore, screaming and hollering, and Flynn could hold on for dear life and feel like if they drove fast enough they could tear a hole through time itself.

It wouldn’t last forever.

Mom was talking about maybe retiring, and the end of the world was supposedly coming with Y2K and he had to start applying to colleges in the fall and each of those things was terrifying in its own way. But right now? It was summer.

It was _summer_.

They got back late from the carnival that always setup on the outskirts of town every July, their mouths sticky with cotton candy, both of them close to sunburned and exhausted but in that good, heavy-bones kind of way that made Flynn feel like he’d actually used the day up right, gotten the most out of it. They’d played the arcades, and he’d won Wyatt a giant stuffed bunny rabbit, and they’d ridden the Ferris wheel and kissed at the top since nobody could see them, and he’d eaten way too many corn dogs, and they’d driven up to their hill to watch the fireworks, only to forget about it once they started kissing, and the only fireworks he knew were the ones in his blood as he wormed his hand between them and stroked them both until they came.

He’d have given anything for a camera to catch Wyatt’s face in those moments. On the Ferris wheel, pink-cheeked and smiling. In the funhouse, sticking his tongue out because he got scared when Flynn jumped out at him. Underneath Flynn on the hill, breathless and dark-eyed. And no camera could capture all of it. A camera couldn’t capture the way Wyatt whined and bucked his hips and begged when Flynn got his hand on Wyatt’s cock. And a camera couldn’t capture Wyatt’s laugh when Flynn won him the bunny rabbit. But it might’ve gotten some of it.

Oh well. Flynn had the memories, at least, and those were never leaving.

“Shh,” he warned, tiptoeing upstairs with Wyatt’s hand securely caught in his. “We don’t want to wake up Mom and Papa.”

“It’s fine, Mom’s still up reading anyway,” Wyatt replied. “She always waits up for us.”

Flynn had noticed that Wyatt was alternating _Mom_ and _Maria_ pretty steadily now. He also noticed how happy Mom looked when Wyatt called her the former, so he tried not to comment on it in fear that Wyatt would clam up. Training good habits into Wyatt was like trying to coax a baby deer out of the woods.

Wyatt nearly tripped getting inside their room and Flynn had to hold his laugh in. “Shh!”

“You shh,” Wyatt grumbled. “Make me shh, why don’t you, if you’re so keen on—”

Flynn grabbed his face and kissed him soundly, then pulled away. Wyatt looked like he’d been hit by a train. “That always works.”

Wyatt glared at him and then yanked him in. “You’re such a jerk—”

Flynn kissed him again, and again, until Wyatt was laughing into his mouth, and fuck he loved Wyatt warm and pliant like this, Wyatt should never be any other way—he wrapped his arm around Wyatt’s lower back, brought them even closer, shivering when Wyatt’s fingers twisted in his shirt, their mouths opening, tongues sliding together—

The door opened and smacked right into the back of Flynn’s head, sending them both stumbling and nearly falling to the floor. “Boys I—” Maria paused.

Wyatt sprang back so fast he tripped on the rug and fell onto the bed, but he wasn’t fast enough to disguise the way he and Flynn had been entangled. Their red, swollen lips and rumpled hair and clothing didn’t help matters, either.

Maria stared at them. Flynn and Wyatt stared back.

“So,” Maria said at last, as Flynn wished the floor would conveniently morph into quicksand and swallow him, “I suppose we have to have a talk.”

* * *

Wyatt wanted to up and die as Maria explained condoms, and safe sex, and diseases, and how you always pee right after sex (what the fuck?) and the importance of consent and discussing things beforehand.

He never wanted to do anything sexual ever again and if that was her goal, she’d sure fuckin’ succeeded with it.

That voice at the back of his head that sounded awfully like Dad tried to whisper that this was all wrong, this was dirty, that real men didn’t like any of the things Maria was talking to them about—but Wyatt tried to ignore that. That voice had gotten a lot quieter over the past couple years and he kept waiting for the day it—and the sick, churning feeling in his stomach that went with it—disappeared altogether.

Asher kept walking past them (because they were doing this in the living room, because of course they were) and looking amused every time. Which was just icing on the cake.

“Any questions?” Maria asked once she was finished.

Wyatt looked at Flynn. Flynn looked like the only question on his mind was, _how do you tie a noose_ , or possibly _how do I erase this entire conversation from my memory_.

“No, I think we’re good,” Flynn said, his voice cracking in a way Wyatt hadn’t heard it crack in three damn years.

Wyatt nodded vigorously.

Maria smirked. “I just want you two to be safe.”

“None of this ‘we’re kids’ nonsense?” Flynn asked.

Maria arched her eyebrow at him. “I was only a year or so older than you when I got pregnant with Gabriel, so no, I’m not. I’m a lot of things, Garcia, but a hypocrite isn’t one of them.”

From the kitchen came the sound of what seemed to be a choked sort of laugh, but when Wyatt whipped his head around to look at Asher, Asher was calmly reading a book and sipping a glass of water.

Maria made a shooing gesture. “Go on, have fun, enjoy… whatever movie it was you were going to see.”

“She’s going to die of laughter the moment we leave the house,” Flynn grumbled, grabbing Wyatt’s hand and dragging him towards the front door.

And that was when it somehow, belatedly, clicked for Wyatt.

Maria had found out they were dating. Asher had found out they were dating. And neither of them had made a fuss over it except to talk to them about safe sex.

He yanked his hand free from Flynn, to Flynn’s surprise, and ran back over to Maria, hugging her.

“Oh.” Maria sounded surprised. “What’s this for, honey?”

“Thank you. For um. Yeah. You know.” He pulled back, embarrassed, and then looked over at Asher.

Flynn hugged Asher all the time. So did Gabriel.

Taking a deep breath, he walked over and hugged Asher, too.

Asher went stiff in surprise, and then, after an agonizing moment where Wyatt thought maybe he’d gotten it wrong and he should just fling himself off a cliff, Asher wrapped his arms around Wyatt, hugging him tightly.

“We know,” he said quietly, and that was all, but somehow it said everything.

Wyatt pulled back, and Asher added, “If you two would be kind enough to also keep it quiet, we’d appreciate it.”

“ _Papa_ ,” Flynn said in the tone of agonized teenagers everywhere.

“What?” Asher shrugged. “Your mother and I are always courteous about…”

“Oh my God I don’t want to hear this.” Flynn grabbed the back of Wyatt’s shirt and literally yanked him back towards the front door. “We’re leaving now, and we’re going to do—things, entirely PG things, goodbye!”

Wyatt could hear Asher laughing as they slammed the front door on their way out.

* * *

Flynn tapped impatiently against the steering wheel as they waited at the red light.

“Y’know if you just let me drive…” Wyatt mumbled from the passenger seat.

“I let you drive if I want to get into a game of chicken with the local sheriff,” Flynn snapped, a little more sharply than he’d intended. Wyatt was a speed demon, but he was admittedly the best driver Flynn knew.

He just had a problem with treating the laws of the road more like suggestions.

Wyatt gave him a look, and Flynn forced himself to breathe slowly. “I’m sorry.” It was just that he wanted to get home quickly. He had to check.

He wanted to see if he got his letter.

Wyatt reached over and slid his hand over Flynn’s on the gear shift, interlocking their fingers. The light turned green, and Flynn shifted gears, Wyatt’s hand not moving from its spot, and tore down the street towards their house.

He almost forgot the parking brake as he flung himself out of the car, checking to see if it had arrived yet. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…

It was there.

Flynn’s hands shook a little as he yanked the letter out, ignoring the postcard from Gabriel, the magazine, and what looked like a bill of some kind as he held the letter in his hands.

“Is it…?” Wyatt asked, hurrying over, breathless.

Flynn handed it to him. “I can’t. You do it.”

Wyatt looked down at the letter, then up at Flynn. “You sure?”

“Fuck, Logan, just do it.” This was _Stanford_ , this was Ivy League, this was—this was everything—

Wyatt tore open the letter, his gaze quickly skimming the page. His eyes got wide. “You—shit. Flynn, _shit_.”

His heart plummeted. He didn’t get in.

And then Wyatt looked up, and to Flynn’s shock, he looked somehow both angry and elated. Like he might cry. “You got accepted.”

Flynn snatched the letter from him, turning it around to read it. _Dear Mr. Flynn, it is our great pleasure to invite you…_

His stomach swooped. Holy shit, he—he’d gotten in, he was going to Stanford, his dream school, the school he’d wanted but had thought—it was just a pipe dream, but he’d—he’d gotten in, he’d _gotten in_ —

He dropped the letter and grabbed Wyatt, almost forgetting himself and kissing Wyatt right there on the front lawn, only derailing himself and turning it into a hug at the last minute. Wyatt hugged him back tightly, trembling. “Fuck, we did it, I’m in!”

“You did it, numbnuts.”

“And who proofread all my essays for me, huh?” Flynn yanked him up and spun him around, not caring if someone saw, whatever, he’d gotten into Stanford, fucking Stanford!

He pulled back, grabbing Wyatt’s hand and picking up the letter again. “C’mon, Mom and Papa’ll want to know, c’mon!”

His parents were elated, of course. Papa cried, squeezing Flynn’s hand. Mom kissed his cheeks and forehead until he was squirming away like he was five years old all over again.

Wyatt was oddly silent.

After it all died down and Papa finished insisting on taking them out to dinner to celebrate, Flynn noticed that Wyatt was just standing in the corner of the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, his arms folded and his eyes unusually bright.

He couldn’t really say anything—and Wyatt obviously didn’t know what to say, he was just quiet all through the night. Papa and Mom were excited, they asked all kinds of questions and chatted about everything, and they called Gabriel and woke up him from a dead sleep to tell him the news—and overall it was a really good night except _Wyatt wasn’t saying anything_.

When they got home Flynn called Jess to tell her, and he had to hold the phone away from his ear as she shrieked at the top of her lungs, and finally Mom and Papa were going to bed, and Wyatt still wasn’t saying anything.

Flynn hung up the phone and went up to his room. “Okay, Logan,” he said, opening his bedroom door, “what’s…”

He paused.

Wyatt wasn’t there.

Wyatt wasn’t there, where the fuck…

If he wasn’t in the room, then he must’ve slipped out, and if he slipped out, there was only one place that Flynn could think of that Wyatt would go.

Wyatt took the car, like a jackass, so Flynn had to use his old bike, but he made it work. He felt a surge of triumph as he saw the car parked at the base of the hill, and let his bike fall to the ground, hiking up to the top. It was a small hill, he realized. It had seemed like a mountain when they were kids.

Sure enough, Wyatt was lying underneath the tree, staring up at the stars. Did he talk to his mother, when he was up here alone? Or was he silent?

“Knew you’d be here,” Flynn said, sitting down beside him. “What’s going on?”

Wyatt blinked at him. “What? Nothing’s going on. I’m happy for you, you’ve worked really hard for this.”

“You’re such a shit liar, Logan.” He inched towards Wyatt. “I know when you’re all up in your head. Talk to me.”

Wyatt looked away, sitting up and propping himself on his elbows. “It’s stupid, I knew you were going somewhere—I want you to go somewhere, I want you to go wherever you want to go but I also—” Wyatt swallowed, blinking rapidly, still trying to hide his emotions, especially his tears, even after all this time. It was a holdover from his father, from _real men don’t cry_ , and Flynn hated that it was still a part of Wyatt, even if he’d been getting better at it.

Wyatt was staying home. He was going to get a vocational degree, get a certificate, and work his way up. He hoped to own his own garage one day. But it did mean… it meant that they would be separated for four years.

They’d talked about this, over and over, and over again, but it was staring them in the face now and Flynn realized that this was everything he’d hoped for but it was also fucking miserable.

“Hey.” He reached for Wyatt, wrapping his hand around Wyatt’s wrist and tugging insistently. Wyatt resisted at first but at last gave in, shuffling over until he could lay his head on Flynn’s shoulder, nuzzling in. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“I haven’t been apart from you for—ever, Flynn, not ever.”

Flynn’s heart was thudding in his chest. It was true. They hadn’t. “I mean—yeah, but, we talked about it, right?”

Wyatt pushed himself up off the ground and began to pace. “Yeah, we did, but—but it’s different when it’s real, and it’s real now, you’re _leaving_ , and—”

“You could at least pretend to be happy for me,” Flynn snapped, feeling like Wyatt had snapped a whip at his face. “It wasn’t easy to get in.”

“I know, I know, fuck, and I’m happy for you, okay? I am! I want to brag about you, Flynn, hey does everyone know my boyfriend’s fucking brilliant, he’s gonna get out of this stupid town, but—but you _can_ get out of this town, you’re good enough for that, and I’m not! I’m just… I’m just going to be stuck here, and you’re going to go off and be with people who are as smart as you are, and capable as you are, and you’re going to realize what a fucking backwater redneck I am and you’re going to go off and do great things and you’ll stop coming home and—”

Flynn got up and stepped in Wyatt’s way as Wyatt’s hand gesturing started to get out of control, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Logan, for fuck’s sake. I couldn’t forget you.”

“You don’t know that!” Wyatt blew out an impatient breath. “How often does Gabriel come home, huh?”

“Gabriel’s in Europe! There’s a difference!”

“America’s twice as wide as Europe!”

“That doesn’t even make any sense!” Flynn shook Wyatt slightly. “Wyatt. _Wyatt_. I love you, okay?”

Wyatt stared at him, mouth slightly agape. Flynn cleared his throat. “Um. This is. Not how I planned on saying it.”

“I mean I kind of—figured, I mean, I hoped…” Wyatt gave him one of those soft open smiles, the kind that curled up the corner of his mouth and revealed his teeth, made him look like that buck-toothed freckly kid with the sticking-out ears all over again, the kid Flynn had, more than once, flung mud at.

Flynn loved him so much it fucking ached. “I love you, you stupid, stubborn idiot, and I won’t forget you. Ever.”

Wyatt lunged forward, flinging his arms around Flynn, crashing into him, and it was all Flynn could do to catch him and hug him back.

“I don’t think I could ever stop loving you, fuck, it’s the only thing that makes sense to me sometimes. A lot of the time.” Wyatt’s words were a bit muffled since his face was mashed into Flynn’s neck, his favorite place to be, apparently, but Flynn heard him loud and clear anyway.

“We’re going to talk it out,” Flynn promised. “We’re going to work it out. We’ll find a way.”

Wyatt nodded, holding on tight.

Flynn pulled back and took Wyatt’s hand, guiding him to lie down under the tree again. Wyatt tucked himself into Flynn’s side, and they stared up at the stars.

“For a long time I used to hope that she was proud of me,” Wyatt said. “Y’know, if she really is dead and she’s… moved on. I hoped that she could see me and was proud of me. But I feel like I don’t care anymore, because I don’t need… I don’t need the approval of some… some person I don’t even know, who didn’t stick around to take care of me. Or didn’t even bring me with her. Because…” He squeezed Flynn’s hand. “I’ve got your mom, and your dad, and you.”

Flynn turned his head, bumping their foreheads together. “You’re always gonna have me.”

It was too damn cold for them to stay out here all night like they used to in the summer, but they stayed out for a while, until at last Wyatt was shivering too hard and they made their way home, sneaking in through the back door like the teenagers they wouldn’t be for much longer. Flynn could feel his eyes closing even as he crawled into bed, Wyatt right behind him, curling up together until he couldn’t figure out where he ended, and Wyatt began.

He would never admit it to Wyatt who was clearly freaking out enough on his own but Flynn was fucking terrified of being separated from him, too. Not because he’d forget him or want to move on to someone else but because he hadn’t been without Wyatt in a decade. How was he going to handle it? Missing Wyatt like a goddamn limb?

It was going to be fucking miserable. But… but if his parents could make their relationship work despite everyone else doing their damndest to shame them for it, then he and Wyatt could make this work, too.

 _He’s always going to have me_ , he promised the stars shining through the window.

* * *

Maria put her hands on her hips and watched as Asher helped move another box into Garcia’s dorm while Wyatt and Garcia… bickered about where Garcia was hanging up his _Queen_ poster.

“Boys, don’t you think maybe you should be doing the heavy lifting?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” Asher said, but Garcia immediately took the box from him while Wyatt mumbled a contrite _sorry Mom_.

She was never going to get tired of hearing him call her that.

She was also never going to get used to her boys growing up and becoming adults.

Garcia was moved in far faster than she was ready for, and she had to work on her breathing to keep herself from crying. The loss of her first husband, the near loss of Gabriel, thinking she had lost Asher, and all the rest—she had held her tears in, then. She had learned how to, because who would be there to dry them? But when Gabriel had left for college, and then when he’d decided to move to Paris, and now with Garcia, her baby boy…

“Oh, Mom,” Garcia hugged her. He was so very tall, now. Just yesterday he’d been a little boy tugging at her skirt and secure in her arms. Letting Asher sing him Croatian lullabies and demanding that Maria cuddle him to sleep. Where had the time gone?

“You call us,” she told him. “If you need anything.”

“Oh, trust me, your phone bill’s about to go way up,” Garcia promised her. Wyatt flushed bright red and she knew that Garcia certainly wouldn’t be running up that phone bill talking to _her_ every day.

“We’re proud of you,” she reminded him.

Asher nodded. He pulled Garcia into a hug as well, and they were both of a height, but Garcia, she thought, was just a bit taller. Only by an inch or two, but still. “ _Dobro si učinio_ ,” Asher said, his voice low and soft.

 _You’ve done well_. She was far from fluent, but she knew enough in Croatian with Asher speaking it to Garcia around the house that she could carry on a conversation.

Garcia nodded, and she saw his eyes get a bit wet. He cared so much about Asher’s opinion, him and Wyatt both.

Asher pulled back, and Maria darted back in to kiss Garcia on the cheek.

Then he looked at Wyatt.

Maria took Asher’s hand, to find that he was already reaching for her, and they slipped out the door. “We’ll be outside,” she told Wyatt. “I love you, Garcia, be good.”

“I’ll see you at Christmas,” Garcia promised.

Maria closed the door and tucked herself into her husband’s side. Asher kissed the top of her head.

“They’re so grown up,” she whispered. “I love them… how they are… but I miss how they were. I miss them as children.”

“They’re still children,” Asher chuckled, leading her down the hallway. “You know, it scares me a bit to think we were that young once.”

“Oh, God, don’t remind me. I hadn’t met you by then, though.”

“You wouldn’t have liked me if you’d known me, then. I was an absolute rascal. And stuck up, thought I was the hottest thing since sliced bread.”

“I would’ve taken you down a peg or two, I’m sure.”

“And I would’ve fallen for you the instant you did,” Asher assured her.

Maria felt her face heating up. If he was anyone else saying it, anyone, she wouldn’t have believed them. She knew her tongue was sharp. But Asher really, truly did love it when she dressed someone down, when she rightfully pointed out someone’s arrogance.

“Come here,” she said, guiding him into a dorm room that someone had yet to move into.

 _I hope Wyatt and Garcia would take their time saying goodbye_ , she thought as she kicked the door closed behind them.

* * *

The moment that Asher and Maria left the room, Flynn yanked Wyatt into him. Wyatt pressed his nose into Flynn’s neck and Flynn dug his fingers harder into Wyatt’s back, loving when Wyatt did that, how it made him feel like he was keeping Wyatt safe. Wyatt shuddered, and Flynn buried his face into Wyatt’s hair, breathed him in, flexed his fingers to feel the play of Wyatt’s muscles underneath them.

He tried to memorize Wyatt’s smell. The shape of Wyatt’s body. The seal of Wyatt’s mouth against his neck. Soon it would be gone. For the first time in ten years, he wouldn’t get to spend every day with Wyatt. Flynn suddenly, powerfully wanted to be twelve years old again, to be a child, to just spend his days climbing the tree on the hill and stargazing with Wyatt, deciding if that cloud was shaped like a train or a whale, to know nothing except the present moment.

“Growing up sucks,” he announced.

Wyatt nodded.

“I’m gonna call you so much you’ll hate me.”

Wyatt nodded again.

Flynn’s chest felt unbearably tight. “C’mon, Logan, say something.”

Wyatt gave a stifled, pained noise. “What do you want me to say? I’m gonna miss you? That doesn’t even—I can’t talk, Flynn, you know I’m not good with—there’s nothing that covers it, it’s gonna feel like _shit_ without you. You know that.”

He pulled back, and took Flynn’s face in his hands, pressing their foreheads together. Flynn could feel Wyatt’s hands shaking.

“Wyatt,” he whispered, knowing what saying his first name did to him, and Wyatt, sure enough, made another pained noise and smashed their mouths together in a bruising kiss.

“I love you,” Wyatt blurted out. “Garcia. _Garcia_. I love you.”

“I know.”

“You _son of a bitch_ —”

Flynn kissed him. “It’s going to be all right. We talked about it. We have a plan. You’re going to visit me, and I’m going to come home on breaks, and we’ll call all the time. I’ll be home all summer. We can road trip all over, and it’s going to be okay, because I’m never letting you go. Okay?”

Wyatt nodded and dove back in, burying his face in Flynn’s neck again. Flynn wrapped his arms around him as tightly as he could and squeezed. “I love you. Loved you my whole fucking life, Wyatt, I’m not going to stop now. It’ll be okay.”

“It’ll be okay,” Wyatt echoed. “We’ll make it work and it’ll be okay.”

“That’s the spirit,” Flynn said, and even though it hurt like Hell to let Wyatt go, he believed in those words, felt them down in his bones. He had always loved this goddamn idiot.

He always would.

**Author's Note:**

> This work now has a Garcyatt sequel: "And the Galaxy is Open"

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [And the Galaxy is Open](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21905533) by [letmetellyouaboutmyfeels](https://archiveofourown.org/users/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels/pseuds/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels)




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